Ramallah

RAMALLAH, Israeli-Occupied West Bank -- They burned tires in Nablus and fought in Hebron streets, but this town has been quietly preparing for Palestinian autonomy by building.A construction boom is turning the bygone summer resort into the economic and administrative center for Palestinians, eight miles up the road from Jerusalem."This will be the most important city in the West Bank. It will be the center of the Palestinian Authority for the next five or 10 rTC years," said Ramallah resident Marwan Barguthi, a top official of the ruling Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The gaunt appearance of Israeli army Sgt. Gilad Shalit after five years illegal detention in Gaza without a single visit by the Red Cross or other international humanitarian organization threw into sharp contrast the full faces and healthy physiques of the Palestinian murderers released from Israeli prisons in exchange for his freedom. To see and hear the recently released terrorists and their supporters in Ramallah and Gaza vow to commit more kidnappings, murder and violence certainly should make us understand that the price of Mr. Shalit's freedom was very steep indeed.

ISRAEL'S strongmen insist they have no desire to take back the land the Jewish state ceded to Palestinians in the heyday of the peace process. But as 150 tanks stormed through Ramallah yesterday, one word came to mind: reoccupation. The tanks rolled in as the Israeli army cut off power to the city of 57,000 and armored bulldozers churned up city streets. The Israeli government spin machine rolled out its take on the offensive. Ramallah, the seat of Palestinian social and political power on the West Bank, has been branded an "axis of terrorism."

The impending restart of peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis here in Washington Thursday calls to mind the many opportunities that slipped through the fingers of peacemakers in the past. What is essential now is to avert the mistakes of those talks — especially the pride and haggling that dragged down hopes of millions of people for a better and peaceful life. I was sitting in the front row in Sharm el Sheikh on Oct. 16, 2000, when President Bill Clinton came out for a press conference, flanked by Ehud Barak for Israel and Yasser Arafat for the Palestinians.

JERUSALEM - The Israeli army tightened its hold on the Palestinian city of Ramallah yesterday, sending tanks into its central square, clamping a curfew on tens of thousands of people and turning streets into shooting galleries. Most residents remained in their homes and left the city to soldiers and Palestinian gunmen. By the end of the day, three people had been shot to death - the deputy commander of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's presidential guard, an Israeli soldier and an Italian photographer.

RAMALLAH, West Bank - The composer and conductor Daniel Barenboim came here yesterday to play the piano, an undertaking more complicated than it sounds. He defied Israel's ban on Israelis' entering Palestinian cities and performed Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata before 300 mostly rapt students at Ramallah's Friends Boys School. He offered no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, just pleasure. "I am not a politician," Barenboim told his audience. "I have no plan to solve the conflict.

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, officially extended Palestinian self-rule to this city abutting Jerusalem yesterday, triumphantly capping a rapid delivery of much of the West Bank to his control."

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Israeli troops staged a rare incursion into this city yesterday, bulldozing cars and vegetable stands near the central square as they engaged gunmen and stone-throwing residents in a chaotic two-hour battle that left four Palestinians dead. The raid, aimed at rescuing a team of undercover Israeli agents, was a diplomatic embarrassment for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as he headed to Egypt for talks with President Hosni Mubarak on how to revive peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

RAMALLAH, West Bank - He looked tired but sounded triumphant, seeing the sunlight after 34 days under siege, and his first stop was at a hospital, to exhort wounded fighters to be strong and recover soon. The Israeli army gone, the siege of his ruined headquarters over, Yasser Arafat was back in public view yesterday and proclaiming his survival a victory for the Palestinian people. He toured the ruins of the Education Ministry, the wreckage of the parliament building, a ransacked cultural center and then a Protestant convent, before returning to the cheering crowd awaiting him outside his compound.

JERUSALEM - After initially refusing to acknowledge the arrests of suspects in the lynching of two Israeli soldiers, the Israeli army announced yesterday that a 23-year-old Palestinian had been detained in the Ramallah attack. But the army offered few details about the arrest of Thabet Abbas Asi of the West Bank village of Beit Liqya, except that he had allegedly participated in the Oct. 12 killings in Ramallah that were captured on film and broadcast around the world. The slayings of Israeli reserve soldiers Sgt. Vadim Novesche and Sgt. Yosef Avrahami became one of the most searing images of the Israeli-Palestinian unrest since it began Sept.

Yuri Lane takes a little CNN and sprinkles it generously with some MTV in From Tel Aviv to Ramallah: A Beatbox Journey, a one-man hip-hop show about the Middle East conflict that opens today at Center Stage. "It can be hard to find the perfect adjective to describe something," Lane said. "Sometimes, you can express things better with music and sound than with words." The self-titled "hip-hop Jew," who has several television, film and theater credits to his name, uses beatbox, mime, song and dance to tell the story of two towns and two young men striving for normality amid the surrounding strife of the conflict.

NATIONAL Pelosi assumes speaker seat Returning to power for the first time in 12 years, House Democrats elected Nancy Pelosi as the first woman speaker and moved swiftly to adopt rules to rein in the influence of lobbyists. pg 1A Negroponte exit far-reaching John D. Negroponte's exit from the nation's top spy post after just 19 months will stall reform efforts and sow further instability and confusion among U.S. intelligence agencies, and leaves his likely successor with little time to establish the fledgling spy chief's office, lawmakers and officials said.

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Israeli troops staged a rare incursion into this city yesterday, bulldozing cars and vegetable stands near the central square as they engaged gunmen and stone-throwing residents in a chaotic two-hour battle that left four Palestinians dead. The raid, aimed at rescuing a team of undercover Israeli agents, was a diplomatic embarrassment for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as he headed to Egypt for talks with President Hosni Mubarak on how to revive peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Abdelhakeem Itayem, a Palestinian with American citizenship, was counting on a simple overnight stay when he traveled from the West Bank to Jordan on a business trip. Six months later, he is still there, trapped in bureaucratic limbo. Israeli officials, who control the border between Jordan and the West Bank, refused to let him return when he presented his U.S. passport at the crossing. "I came to Amman for one day. I had one suit and a change of clothes for one day. And now I can't go back," Itayem said by phone from Amman, where he has rented an apartment while awaiting an answer.

JERUSALEM -- The Fatah movement that dominates Palestinian politics was immersed in turmoil yesterday as leaders sought to avert a potentially damaging party split five weeks before elections to parliament. Members of Fatah's so-called young guard insisted they had no intention of backing down after submitting a list of candidates to rival the official Fatah slate. The renegades offered a candidate roster, under the name of a new party called The Future, with jailed uprising leader Marwan Barghouti at the top. The official Fatah slate also placed Barghouti in the top slot.

JERUSALEM - Mahmoud Abbas, who is expected to win the Jan. 9 elections to succeed Yasser Arafat as Palestinian president, praised Arafat's legacy in a speech yesterday marking the end of the 40-day mourning period for the former leader. Abbas, 69, who has succeeded Arafat as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was lavish in his praise as he spoke in Arafat's old headquarters in Ramallah. "No words of homage are sufficient to commemorate his memory," Abbas said in the presence of Palestinian notables and Arab representatives, in a speech sometimes broken by bursts of gunfire homage from the crowd outside.

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- It was only a small sign of progress, but in a city where not a single traffic light works and where Israeli soldiers stand guard, it was nevertheless a welcome change: Last weekend, a Palestinian construction crew repaved a road. It was just a road, but it was also a manifestation of the fragile optimism here that the United States is about to begin a new effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But even the most hopeful Palestinians, such as the worker who has rebuilt this road four times in the past year, are unsure what a new push for peace can accomplish.

RAMALLAH, West Bank - To inventory this city's police force is a simple task. There is almost nothing left. During its two-week occupation of the city, the Israeli army confiscated most of the police officers' weapons. Nearly all the police cars were crushed by tanks. The police chief, Salah Abu Salah, is trapped with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in a compound surrounded by soldiers. The deputy chief has been detained by Israel. It's a land of no law and no order. "Most of the people I worked with are either in Israeli jails, wounded or dead," said a 21-year-old police officer standing under a clump of palm trees in Manara Square, Ramallah's central gathering place.

RAMALLAH, West Bank - There certainly is no truly grand shopping street here, no Fifth Avenue or Champs Elysees, but this city, the Palestinian capital of politics and culture, is by far the most cosmopolitan in the West Bank or Gaza Strip, and showing new signs of life. The shopping hub is Manara Square, a chaotic intersection surrounding decorative stone lions and a tall tower rusted with age. Sidewalks are crowded with families shopping, merchants hawk cookware from China, money-changers clutch fistfuls of cash and cooks dip balls of chickpeas into sizzling oil to make falafel.

RAMALLAH, West Bank - Palestinians buried Yasser Arafat here yesterday amid chaos and outpourings of grief, after mourners firing guns in the air engulfed the helicopter that carried his flag-draped casket from his funeral in Cairo and briefly wrested the coffin from an honor guard. Crying, screaming and fighting to get closer, members of the crowd overwhelmed police early on and climbed the walls of the presidential compound, awaiting two Egyptian helicopters carrying Arafat's body and some of the Palestinian leader's longtime aides.