JERUSALEM (Islamweb & Agencies) - Major world powers have blasted Israel for its takeover of Palestinian headquarters in Arab East Jerusalem in response to a Palestinian Resistance bombing in the Jewish western part of the city.Israeli police seized Orient House, the main East Jerusalem office of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and reoccupied the Palestinian governor's building in the nearby village of Abu Dis in a bloodless overnight raid Friday.
The moves were a politically charged reply to the bombing that killed 16 people, including the bomber, and wounded about 100 at a pizza parlor packed with customers Thursday.
The United States criticized Israel's reassertion of control over the Palestinian areas and branded the step a ''political escalation'' that sabotaged a negotiated settlement.
``We are concerned about the Israeli action against Orient House and the Palestinian town of Abu Dis,'' a State Department official said, reading from a prepared script.
The official, who declined to be named, said: ``These actions represent a political escalation, undermine faith and confidence in a negotiated settlement of this conflict and increase the risk of further deterioration of the political situation.''
Egypt joined the chorus of condemnation. Its foreign minister called the seizure of Orient House provocative.
``(Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher) emphasized that this action by the Israeli forces was one of a string of provocative Israeli moves which contravene agreements (between the parties),'' Egypt's official Middle East News agency (MENA) said.
``DANGEROUS LINE''
While Israel buried its dead, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov held urgent telephone talks with top Israeli and Palestinian, U.S. and U.N. officials, and warned of impending catastrophe if the current cycle of bloodshed is not halted.
France also slammed the Israeli takeover, noting that it violated the 1993 Oslo interim peace deal, now moribund.
Israel's crackdown was a direct challenge to Palestinian claims to East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.
Police took over other Palestinian offices in and around East Jerusalem and aircraft flattened a police post in the West Bank in a missile strike. Israel said these were ``measured'' steps to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.
The Palestinian leadership, in a statement, called the takeover a ``contemptuous expression of the arrogance of power.``The Palestinian people are left with no choice but to escalate resistance and the Intifada (uprising) to liberate Holy Jerusalem and regain the Orient House and all other Palestinian institutions,'' said Ahmed Abdel Rahman, an aide to President Yasser Arafat.
Israeli Public Security Minister Uzi Landau said the Orient House takeover was a ``permanent'' measure meant to assert Israeli control over all of Jerusalem and stymie attackers.
Thursday's bombing in the heart of West Jerusalem, claimed by the militant Islamic group Hamas, was the deadliest in the city since Palestinians began their uprising against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip last September.
Differences over the future of Jerusalem lie at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and were a prime cause of the failure of the two sides to reach a peace deal last year.
Israel occupied East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East War and annexed it in a move not recognized internationally. It views the entire city as its eternal and indivisible capital.
The Palestinians want the eastern part of the city to be the capital of a future state, and Orient House has served as their municipal and symbolic center.
Palestinian hospital officials in Gaza said Saturday that two Palestinians shot and wounded by Israeli troops a day earlier during stone-throwing clashes near the Karni commercial crossing with Israel died of their wounds.
The two new fatalities raised the Palestinian death toll to at least 515 since the start of the uprising. A total of 147 Israelis and 14 Israeli Arabs have also been killed.
PHOTO CAPTIONS:
Israeli policeman raise an Israeli flag at the Orient House, the east-Jerusalem headquarter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) August 10, 2001 after Israeli police and special forces entered and closed it following a deadly suicide bombing. A Palestinian suicide bomber killed at least 15 people in the heart of Jerusalem in one of the worst blasts since a Palestinian uprising erupted in late September. (Nati Shohat/Flash 90 via Reuters