Israel and the Palestinians were set on Thursday to hold security talks to discuss a phased Israeli withdrawal from some occupied areas, but Palestinians say Israel’s targeted killings and planned deportations are ”poisoning” talks.
Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer was to meet Palestinian interior minister Abdel Razaq al-Yahya to discuss the ”Gaza First” withdrawal plan, Israeli public radio said.
The plan for a staged withdrawal from recently reoccupied areas in the Gaza Strip in exchange for a Palestinian crackdown on militants there was first presented during a Jerusalem meeting between the two men on August 5.
After approving the plan in principle, the Palestinians later rejected it, arguing Israel had set new conditions in the meantime.
The Palestinians fear that the proposal might become ”Gaza Only,” with Israel taking credit for pulling back while sealing its grip on the West Bank, and they want iron-clad guarantees that Israel will also withdraw from areas in the West Bank.
The meeting, whose participants both sides refused to confirm, comes a day after Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres met with chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat to release another 70-million shekels ($15-million) worth of frozen funds to the Palestinians early next week.
”An additional 70-million shekels will be transferred to the Palestinians at the start of the week, probably on Monday,” foreign ministry representative Yaffa Ben Ari said.
The Palestinian Authority received a first payment last month for a similar sum of customs duties and taxes withheld from the Palestinians by Israel over the past two years of fighting.
Erekat described the talks as ”a comprehensive and serious meeting” but added: ”We cannot talk about a positive meeting.”
He said that in, addition to the financial discussions, he had asked Israel to release Palestinian prisoners, including Marwan Barghuti, the head of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement in the West Bank who was charged Wednesday in a Tel Aviv court with murder and terrorism.
”We said that not only the arrests of Barghuti and (Palestine Liberation Organisation committee member) Abdul Rahim Mallouh, but Israel’s policy of assassinations and deportations was a poison which was causing an escalation,” he said.
The Israeli army, meanwhile, faced fresh accusations of using Palestinian civilians as human shields. A 19-year-old was shot dead in the town of Tubas when the army told him to go into a residence where the Jenin military chief for the Islamic movement Hamas, Nasser Jarrar, was hiding.
Entering Jarrar’s house, Nidal Abu Mohsen was gunned down. The army accused Hamas of shooting him as he entered, but the teenager’s family said Israeli bullets had killed him, saying he had been forced into the role of a ”human shield” for the army.
Jarrar died in the ensuing gun battle, the army said.
Abu Mohsen’s uncle, Ali Daragameh, a field worker for the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, said his nephew ”was taken by the soldiers and was forced to go to Jarrar’s house at gunpoint,” the rights group said in a statement.
The army confirmed Abu Mohsen’s death, saying he had been killed while trying to enter the house for the army to negotiate with Jarrar, but denied Abu Mohsen had been used as a ”human shield”.
”There was a Palestinian at the spot and we thought it would be best if a Palestinian would try and tell Jarrar to hand himself over peacefully, so we used loudspeakers to tell them he was coming in,” an army representative said.
Israel accused Jarrar, who lost both legs and an arm last year trying to plant a roadside bomb, of planning a ”mega-attack” to bring down an Israeli skyscraper.
However, the army representative said the military had wanted to capture Jarrar alive.
As violence dragged on in the Palestinian territories, reports emerged in the Israeli press that Israel could drop nuclear weapons on Iraq if Baghdad used non-conventional weapons on the Jewish state during a possible US attack on the regime of Saddam Hussein.
”If Iraq strikes at Israel with non-conventional weapons, causing massive casualties among the civilian population, Israel could respond with a nuclear retaliation that would eradicate Iraq as a country,” the daily Haaretz said, quoting a US intelligence report.
”Such an Israeli reaction could destroy Iraq as a state,” said Haaretz, quoting the report. _ Sapa-AFP