Sharon, Abbas meet to discuss roadmap

News, May 2003, Al-Jazeerah.info

Agencies, Jordan Times, 5/30/03

ISRAELI AND Palestinian premiers met Thursday to discuss disagreements over security and Palestinian statehood ahead of a three-way summit next week with US President George W. Bush to be held in Aqaba.

Meanwhile, a Palestinian was killed and at least one other wounded late Thursday when an Israeli tank fired a flechette round at a town in the central Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical and security sources said.

Mohammad Abu Sbeitan, 21, was killed in Deir Al Balah by the lethal shell which sprays thousands of darts over hundreds of metres, ripping apart anyone in its way.

Another Palestinian was wounded by the shell, but his condition was not immediately known, the sources said.

Also Thursday, Israeli troops shot dead a Hamas activist during a raid into the southern Gaza City of Khan Younis, Palestinian security sources said.

Relatives said the 24-year-old had been wounded and was being carried to his house when soldiers shot him dead in a nearby street.

The army said 29 people were arrested in the Khan Younis sweep, prompting activists from Hamas' armed wing to take the streets and call over loudspeakers for revenge.

Earlier in the day, in the northern West Bank city of Jenin, a resistance fighter belonging to Islamic Jihad was gunned down by occupation troops, the group's local leader and Palestinian medical sources told AFP.

The army said it sent in some 20 tanks and armoured personnel carriers to dismantle armed groups' infrastructure and arrested nine militants.

Jenin Mayor Walid Abu Mueiss accused the army of damaging homes and shops, and mistreating women and children during the raid.

The deaths raised to 3,269 the number of people killed since the start of the Intifada in September 2000, including 2,467 Palestinians and 742 Israelis, according to an AFP count.

Six weeks ago, Israel's supreme court gave the army the green light to use flechette tanks shells.

But Israel's advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights said their use was in contravention of the Geneva Conventions on the rules of warfare and should be banned.

The meeting between Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was their second summit in two weeks.

The two sides were at odds over a declaration recognising the right of a Palestinians to a state and the way the Palestinians are going about stopping resistance groups from attacking Israeli targets — key elements of an international peace plan called the "roadmap."

The peace plan is the focus of the three-way summit set for Wednesday in Aqaba, where Bush plans to push for a start to implementation of the blueprint for ending violence and progressing towards a Palestinian state in 2005.

Palestinian officials said that during the meeting Thursday between Abbas and Sharon, they were to demand an explicit Israeli statement at the Aqaba summit recognising their right to a state. An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Israel was prepared to issue the statement, but only after the Palestinians show concrete efforts to stop attacks against Israelis.

Abbas has been trying to persuade resistance groups to accept a ceasefire in the struggle against Israel, but Israel insists on a crackdown, the word used in the "roadmap," and destruction of what Israel calls the "terrorist infrastructure."

Abbas said in comments published Thursday that the Islamic resistance group Hamas could agree as early as next week to halt attacks on Israeli targets. The leader of the Islamic Jihad resistance group also offered a conditional ceasefire.

"If there is a readiness by Israel to stop its military actions against us and start freeing political prisoners, I think we are ready to guarantee a total cessation of violence," Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath told Israel TV.

However, in a statement faxed to AP in Gaza, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, linked to the mainstream Fateh movement, said it would continue attacks "in any time and in any place while the occupiers are taking our land, our prisoners are still in prison and our refugees are living outside their homeland."

Abbas says that with the Palestinian security service decimated by Israeli operations, he does not have the ability to destroy the resistance groups.

Others say Abbas, appointed prime minister last month as part of Israeli and US efforts to sideline Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, does not have the political clout to destroy the sophisticated resistance infrastructure, which includes bomb factories, weapons smuggling rings and a widespread network of underground activists and armed cells throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel would "definitely not" accept a ceasefire, or hudna, Sharon adviser Zalman Shoval said.

A ceasefire could only be a first step to beginning "an effective, determined effort against the terror that includes taking apart the terror organisations, arresting terrorists and bring them to justice, transferring the illegal weapons to a third country, ending the incitement," he said.

"The hudna is a temporary ceasefire; (the terror) can start up again any day if they do not take apart the terror organisations. It is a tap that you open and close," Shoval said.

Palestinian Cabinet Minister Ziad Abu Amr said the Israelis should not be concerned with the details of how the Palestinians end the attacks.

"The Israelis would do us a service if they would not try to impose its solutions on us," he told the Associated Press.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

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