Gaza City | Monday
VIOLENCE flared in the Gaza Strip on Monday, with three Palestinians shot dead overnight, after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said a massive three-week military operation in the West Bank was over for the time being.
And as the Palestinians tried to restore their shattered lives, on the diplomatic front Israeli leaders warned that the Jewish state must fight to break out of the isolation in which it has sunk amid world unease at Sharon’s policies.
Israeli forces pulled out Sunday from Nablus and most of Ramallah after an occupation that left scores dead, but Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat remained under close siege in his Ramallah headquarters.
Troops also still surrounded the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where the 200 occupants including a number of wanted Palestinian gunmen were said to have run out of food.
Sharon officially announced Sunday the end of the first phase of Operation Defensive Wall, which also saw the occupation of Tulkarem and Qalqilya, but top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat dismissed the Israeli pull-backs as a ”lie for television”.
Israel’s troops and tanks are keeping a tight grip on the West Bank, encircling the major towns, making sporadic incursions here and there, and carrying out arrests.
Meanwhile the controversy over the number of Palestinians killed in a fierce battle in the Jenin refugee camp still raged, ahead of the dispatch of a UN fact-finding mission to the scene.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States was ”deeply troubled” by the humanitarian situation in Jenin, and told the Palestinians they can ”have a friend in the United States.” He said he had authorized an aid shipment to the camp, where the Palestinians say ”hundreds” were massacred, while Israel puts the death toll at ”dozens’, mainly combatants.
Powell said he would be returning to the region ”in the not-too-distant future,” following his unsuccessful mission earlier this month.
”It was a difficult mission, but I think we made some progress,” Powell said, adding that he was ”pleased” by the latest withdrawals of Israeli forces from Palestinian towns.
He said he would be pressing forward with a ”strategic framework” he announced before leaving Jerusalem, focused on increased security, an early start to political discussions, humanitarian aid and economic reconstruction.
Powell also praised a Saudi peace initiative promising normal relations between Arab countries and Israel in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from occupied lands, ahead of a key meeting between President George Bush and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz on Thursday.
The immediate next steps are finding a non-violent resolution to the standoffs outside Arafat’s headquarters and in Bethlehem, according to Powell.
Arafat’s house arrest must be loosened ”sooner or later” so that he has greater access to ”the means of control, the means of communicating with others,” he said.
But even sequestered in his headquarters, Arafat has ”a powerful voice” and the means to communicate with leaders of the Palestinian movement, Powell insisted.
And he has been told that if he re-asserts control and ”moves away from the path of violence and terrorism onto a new path,” he can count on US assistance in rebuilding Palestinian society, Powell said.
Meanwhile Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres vowed to combat European criticism of Israel at a meeting starting Monday of EU foreign ministers and their Mediterranean rim counterparts in Valencia, Spain.
”We were judged by rumours and not by facts,” Peres told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a leading pro-Israel political group in the United States.
”Where in Europe there was anti-Semitism against the Jewish person, today I’m afraid there is anti-Semitism against the Jewish state,” he charged.
”I shall represent a lonely voice your lonely voice our lonely voice but the right voice,” Peres said. Sharon’s predecessor as prime minister, Ehud Barak, told the same forum that Israel must stay on the moral high ground to achieve a lasting peace with the Palestinians.
”We should realize that it is essential for us to become right, not just might,” Barak, a moderate like Peres, said.
Amid the isolation, US support for Israel remains strong, though there are signs some Americans are losing patience with the continued violence.
The Israeli-Palestinian crisis is set to dominate the talks in Spain, which Syria and Lebanon are boycotting because of Israel’s presence.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher will attend the conference, but made it clear that he had no intention of talking to Peres.
The success of extreme right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen, who will face incumbent Jacques Chirac in the run-off in French presidential elections after Sunday’s first-round voting, is also expected to be a talking-point in Valencia.
Israeli newspapers Monday expressed profound shock at the result, calling Le Pen an unabashed racist and antisemite. – Sapa-AFP
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