To The Brink

It's not just the soaring body count. Both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are using new tactics to inflict death on each other. Is all-out war inevitable?

Ariel Sharon loathes Yasser Arafat. If he could do it all over again, Sharon has said, he would have killed Arafat in Lebanon 20 years ago when he had the chance. And yet last week--with the number of Israelis slaughtered on his watch rising, the country sliding closer to war and its citizens sinking deeper into despair--Sharon tried to keep his enemy awake, as if Arafat were the only person in the world who could understand his troubles. Before dawn on Wednesday, Israeli Apache helicopters fired missiles into a building next to the office compound in Ramallah where Arafat has been...

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