News Brief

(IsraelNN.com) A longtime aide to Yasser Arafat said that Arafat planned an "intifada" against Israel several years before October 2000, and supported all of the armed factions, including Hamas, at its outset. He thus confirmed what many Israelis have been saying for years: that the 2000 Terror War (or Oslo War) was not a spontaneous reaction to an Israeli move, but had been planned in advance. 

Marwan Kanfani, who served as a senior advisor to Arafat for 20 years, has published a new book called "Years of Hope" and gave an interview to Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi in which he said that Arafat thought of the "intifada" after Yitzchak Rabin was assassinated and Binyamin Netanyahu had been elected in Israel.

"After Rabin's death, matters began to be handled in a different atmosphere and here is when 'Abu Amar' (Arafat) began, at this early time, to consider a different path," Kanfani said. Netanyahu "decided to finish the peace process," he explained.