Israel will hand control of two West Bank cities to the Palestinian Authority today after a flurry of negotiations and American pressure on both sides to prevent the collapse of the six week-old ceasefire.
Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, has also agreed to let the authority’s president, Yasser Arafat, leave his compound in Ramallah for the first time for more than a year, to visit the grave of his sister, who was buried in Gaza last week.
Arafat wants his return internationally guaranteed.
President George Bush’s special envoy, John Wolf, has engaged in several days of arm-twisting to prevent Israel’s killing of Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists and the first suicide bombings since the ceasefire began giving rise to a further spate of violence.
The Palestinian Authority will take control of Jericho and Qalqilia.
Its security minister, Mohammed Dahlan, had said that it was not prepared to accept responsibility for security in Qalqilia until the Israelis tore down a 9-metre concrete wall around the city.
”Dahlan did not want to be seen as a prison guard,” a Palestinian official said.
”Dahlan feared that people in Qalqilia would think he was tacitly endorsing the wall.”
The mayor of Qalqilia told Wolf, who visited the city last week, that he he did not want the authority to assume control, for the reason Dahlan gave.
But US pressure on Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, and Dahlan led to a compromise in which the authority will take Qalqilia and Jericho now and get what they really want, their capital Ramallah, and Tulkarm, in a fortnight.
Israel’s withdrawal from Ramallah would lift the siege from Arafat’s compound and leave Hebron, Nablus and Jenin as the larger cities occupied by Israel 18 months after its tanks surged back into the West Bank.
The Israelis have backed away from their demand that Dahlan lock up about 400 Palestinian men wanted for killing Israelis as part of an operation to disarm and disable ”terrorist organisations”.
Under US pressure, they have agreed to accept a Palestinian offer to confine the men to a town under Palestinian control, monitored to ensure that they are not involved in violence.
Dahlan intends to try to recruit them into the Palestinian security forces or find some other means of paying them. The Israeli will guarantee not to arrest or harm them: in effect, giving them amnesty.
Jonathon Peled, a senior Israeli foreign ministry official, said the government had agreed to the compromise because it wanted to keep the ceasefire alive.
”It’s a bold and calculated risk on our part to try and give a life line to the so-called ceasefire and pass the ball to the Palestinians, even though scepticism is the prevailing mood at the moment,” he said.
But the West Bank withdrawal was criticised by some members of Sharon’s cabinet. Uzi Landau, from Sharon’s Likud party, accused the prime minister of encouraging terrorism.
”This withdrawal will, in the end, expose citizens of Israel to new and greater dangers, because from every city from which we withdraw, Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and similar groups will be able to set out unhindered on the next wave of terrorist attacks,” he said.
Wolf stepped up the pressure after two Israelis were killed by suicide bombings last week. One was by a renegade faction of Arafat’s Fatah, the other by Hamas, in retaliation for the killing of two of its commanders in Nablus — an act which Hamas said breached the ceasefire.
The Israelis acted with restraint after the bombings. But everyone feared that the violence would increase after the army killed the Islamic Jihad commander in Hebron, Ahmed Sidr, on Thursday.
Islamic Jihad threatened retribution ”like an earthquake”
The Israeli army said Sidr was resisting arrest while planning further bomb attacks, but his killing was interpreted as revenge for the death of the Israeli military commander in Hebron in an attack by Islamic Jihad last year.
Although the army is withdrawing from some cities, it has staked out new positions in Hebron by setting up two military posts in Palestinian areas. – Guardian Unlimited Â