Israel agreed the terms of a troop withdrawal from most of the Gaza strip yesterday under American pressure to ensure that the road map to peace begins to deliver practical results to the Palestinians.
Its decision came just hours after Hamas and other groups which the Israelis define as ”terrorist organisations” confirmed a three-month halt to all attacks, inside Israel and in the occupied territories.
The spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, told al-Jazeera television: ”Hamas has studied all the developments and reached a decision that it will give the condition known as the hudna [ceasefire].”
As part of the deal Israel has agreed to suspend the controversial ”targeted assassinations” of those it accuses of organising suicide bombings and other attacks. The assassinations frequently cost many innocent lives.
The White House welcomed the agreements as ”significant” steps forward for the road map the day before the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is expected in Israel to drive the peace process along after a recent wave of bloodshed threatened to wreck it.
But the ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal from almost all of Gaza, except the Jewish settlements and ”buffer zones” to protect them, opens the door to a more daunting challenge – the road map’s requirement on the Palestinian Authority to dismantle ”terrorist capabilities and infrastructure” and to seize illegal weapons.
The Israeli government and the US state department said yesterday that they expected the Palestinian leadership to confront Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other groups and to fulfill the road map’s demands.
”A state can have only a single armed authority and cannot have to compete with armed authority from other groups,” said the state department spokesman, Richard Boucher.
But in an interview with the Guardian last week, the Palestinian security minister, Mohammed Dahlan, who played a leading role in negotiating the ceasefire and troop withdrawal, insisted that he would negotiate with and not confront Hamas, and that there would be no arrests of its activists.
”No one will force us into a conflict with Hamas,” he said.
Palestinian leaders say they fear that a confrontation with the widely popular Hamas in Gaza could lead to civil war.
As a result, Israeli officials have privately scorned the ceasefire by saying it merely gives Hamas breathing space to organise future attacks.
”The ceasefire is poison covered in honey,” a senior foreign ministry official, Gideon Meir, told the Jerusalem Post.
The pullout from Gaza is expected to begin early next week after final talks on the details tomorrow. – Guardian Unlimited Â