Colin Powell, the United States secretary of state, won an assurance from Israel on Monday that it would ease its grip on the occupied territories and allow greater freedom of movement before the Palestinian presidential election in January.
But Powell disappointed the Palestinian leadership by declining to press an array of other issues, including the continued expansion of Jewish settlements and the revival of the road map to the creation of a Palestinian state next year.
Powell met the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, in Jerusalem and then travelled to Jericho for talks with Palestinian leaders, including the new leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Mahmoud Abbas.
Later in the day, Abbas was named Fatah’s presidential candidate, making him the favourite to succeed Yasser Arafat at the head of the Palestinian Authority.
Powell described Arafat’s death as a ”moment of opportunity that should not be lost”. The US-Israeli talks were kept focused on the Palestinian election and on demands for greater efforts to fight ”terror”.
But Abbas and the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, raised a host of issues with Powell, including the continued assassinations by Israel and the financial crisis in the occupied territories.
The Palestinian leaders also presented Powell with a file of statistics on the impact of the ”security” barrier in the West Bank and the growth of Jewish settlements.
”We asked for a clear end to settlement building,” the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said.
”All we received was a very strong commitment from America to ensure free and fair elections. It’s premature to judge where we go from here,” he added.
The leaders also pressed Powell to ensure that Sharon’s plan to withdraw Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip was not a tactic to delay the creation of a Palestinian state.
Qureia said the Palestinians were looking for a recommitment to the road map to peace, which envisages the creation of a state by the end of next year.
Powell said both sides had to be prepared to meet their road map obligations, but he was noncommittal about the timetable.
”I think it is important to have a Palestinian state as soon as possible. [Whether] it can be done by the end of 2005 can only be determined by what happens on the ground,” he said.
”It can only happen when the two parties negotiate the outstanding matters and the final status agreement.”
Sharon said he would continue with unilateral disengagement but Israel would ”do its utmost to ease conditions for the Palestinian Authority elections, so that they might be held in an orderly fashion”.
But he repeated his demand that the Palestinians must ”halt terror” as a condition for further progress toward peace.
”There were will be no compromises on this issue, and it will be the Palestinians who will lose if they don’t act against terrorism,” he said.
Powell praised the new Palestinian leaders’ efforts to bring groups such as Hamas into the mainstream. ”They are working hard to draw them into the political process and stop them taking acts that might damage the process,” he said.
An Israeli army officer who repeatedly shot an unarmed 13-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza, Iman al-Hams, has been charged with the illegal use of his weapon, obstruction of justice and conduct unbecoming an officer. Her parents said they wanted him charged with murder. – Guardian Unlimited Â