Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Live Sunday

Israeli Troops Pull Out of West Bank

Aired April 21, 2002 - 18:01   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: Israel continues to make good on its pledge to pull out of West Bank towns. Today, tanks rumbled out of parts of Nablus and other parts of Ramallah, but troops cornering Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters are staying put, as are those surrounding Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity.

The Israeli withdrawal could not come a moment sooner for the civilians who have been confined to their homes for nearly a month now. As CNN's Nic Robertson reports, the people of Ramallah must now begin the long process of rebuilding their city.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The city streets are now bustling here. This is the main downtown area in the center of Ramallah, and from the very early hours this morning, pretty much as soon as it was daylight, people were coming out on the streets to clean up their businesses, to clean up the garbage that is beginning to lie and rot in some of the streets here to sweep out the broken glass from their stores.

Where we are now was an Israeli military checkpoint. That is now gone. All the APCs and tanks from the downtown area have now gone. They have pulled back to the periphery, to the perimeter of Ramallah.

(on camera): If we look over my shoulder, you can see the poster there, a picture of Yasser Arafat, the message to him in Arabic reads: "You're our shining knight and you can lead us to the future that we want." It's a poster of Palestinian unity. What apparently has happened there, it appears as if Israeli military units that have been based here sprayed graffiti on it and what the graffiti says is it says: "Mother. Mother. Mother. Run away. The Israeli Army or a special unit of the Israeli Army is arriving. Run Away." That an indication perhaps of some of the things that people of Ramallah were waking up to today.

If we go down to the side there and look down the road, that is the road leading to the compound of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. There is still tight security around that compound. Late in the day, a group of -- they would call themselves peace activists. A pro-Palestinian group tried to get into that compound. There were about a dozen of them and they ran into the tight security that surrounds that compound. There were flash grenades going off. Tear gas was thrown by the Israeli troops, also live rounds fired not at those activists, but close to them. Six of the group were able to get inside Yasser Arafat's compound and other members of their group there, they're protesting about the current situation.

The Israeli government says the reason that the security remains around Yasser Arafat's compound and not in the rest of Ramallah is that within that compound, there are men that they want to try for the killing of an Israeli minister late last year, and until the Palestinian leader turns those men over to the Israeli authorities for trial, they say they will keep that security presence around that compound.

Nic Robertson, CNN, Ramallah.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com