JERUSALEM — Heavy Israeli-Palestinian gunbattles raged early Monday near a holy shrine in biblical Bethlehem. In the Gaza Strip, Yasser Arafat carried a weapon in public for the first time since 1994 and complained that Israel violated an agreement to "cool down the situation."
The Israeli army said Palestinian gunmen attacked the Bethlehem shrine, revered by Jews as Rachel's Tomb, the burial site of the biblical matriarch, from three sides and apparently tried to take it over. Palestinians said the fighting broke out after soldiers and Jewish settlers attacked Muslim worshippers.
The confrontation lasted hours, and at one point, Israeli helicopters aiming at Palestinian gunmen fired two rockets at the Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem in the West Bank, the army said.
Fourteen Palestinians were injured in Bethlehem area fighting Sunday and early Monday, including two who were in serious condition with gunshot wounds, Palestinian hospitals said.
The shooting also caused damage in several Bethlehem neighborhoods. Iman Al Azza, 35, surveyed the blackened rooms of his home's second floor. The rooms caught fire during the spray of Israeli helicopter gunfire. Al Azza's home is near an eight-story building overlooking Rachel's Tomb that is often used by Palestinian gunmen.
Elsewhere, residents displayed bedsheets riddled with bullet holes and showed visitors the holes in their roof tops.
Arafat said the Israeli shelling "was a shock because we had agreed to cool down the situation." For the first time since his return from exile in 1994, Arafat displayed a weapon in public. As he reviewed an honor guard outside his Gaza City office, the Palestinian leader carried a German-made machine pistol.
Arafat had just returned from a visit to Qatar and explained that he was holding the weapon because Jewish settlers blocked Gaza's main north-south thoroughfare, the road he had to travel in order to reach Gaza City.
"The most important thing is that right now they were closing Salah Edin Road and that is why I am carrying this," he told reporters.