I would suggest to the Palestinians to hold your horses, because we are much stronger than we were when we sat in Gaza. So if anyone has illusions that this means they can force Israel into making further concessions under pressure of violence, they're in for a big surprise.

The sort of deceptive lull the past two months of the attacks was mainly because of the sustained effort on our part to stop terrorist activity and to prevent suicide and homicide bombings from coming out of the territories or out of Gaza. Had we not taken this campaign we would have had many suicide and homicide bombings like the one we experienced today in Haifa.

Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose. It will only give him (Saddam) more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction.

This is not the time to mess with us.

So maybe by taking him out now, we have saved the lives of scores of Israeli children and women who would have been his victims in the next terrorist attack.

You don't make peace by writing a [public relations] article in the op-ed segment of The New York Times. You make peace by stopping terrorism. And a [public relations] campaign is no substitute for stopping terrorism, and Arafat for the past 16 months has not stopped the campaign of terrorists against our innocent civilians.

There could be more, there could be not.

The operation is going well and his condition is stable.

The Palestinian people and the Palestinian leadership have reached a moment of truth, and they have to make a decision. We are not going to allow ourselves to continue to be victims of this terrorist campaign.