British Prime Minister Tony Blair pursued his quest to bring peace to the Middle East on Wednesday, unveiling plans for a conference to help prepare the Palestinians for statehood after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.
Blair said he hopes the conference, which officials said should take place in London in early March, ”can be of some assistance” towards realising the vision of a viable Palestinian state as laid out in the road-map peace plan.
”The viability has to be that of a state that is democratic, that is not giving any succor or help to terrorism, and that uses the help that is given from the outside in a proper and transparent way,” Blair told a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon after they held talks in Jerusalem.
The British premier, who later arrived in Ramallah to meet Palestinian leaders, was making the first visit to the region by a world leader since the death of Yasser Arafat last month.
Blair said next year’s pull-out from Gaza is ”an important opportunity” to make progress in the peace process and that the conference will ensure ”there are plans and proposals in place to allow the Palestinians to become a proper partner for peace” after the withdrawal.
Sharon welcomed the conference but said Israel will not take part as its focus will be on Palestinian reforms.
The prospect of the Gaza pull-out and the emergence of a new Palestinian leadership after the death of Arafat has prompted hope of a genuine breakthrough in the peace process after more than four years of violence.
Sharon has been encouraged by new Palestine Liberation Organisation chairperson Mahmoud Abbas’s condemnation of the use of weapons in the four-year Palestinian uprising and by his efforts to bring about a new ceasefire among the armed factions.
While pledging to seize the window of opportunity opening up in the region, Sharon said he has yet to detect any sign of Arafat’s successors being prepared to crack down on militants.
”By now we don’t see even the slightest step taken by the Palestinians” to put an end to attacks, he said.
Speaking in Ramallah, Abbas said he expects a resumption of negotiations with Israel after next month’s election for Palestinian Authority president.
”There have been no contacts with Israel [about the Gaza pull-out] but it is natural that negotiations would take place after the elections,” Abbas told reporters.
Sharon cut off all contacts with the Palestinian leadership after a massive suicide bomb in Jerusalem in August 2003.
Opposition to the Gaza pull-out is meanwhile gathering steam among the settlers, some of whom caused outrage on Tuesday by donning orange Stars of David as a mark of protest, drawing an analogy to the plight of Jews under the Nazis.
The head of the main settler organisation called on supporters on Wednesday to lay siege to Parliament in a bid to block the planned pull-out, taking their cue from the mass protests in Ukraine.
”We are appealing for protests to take place day and night at the Knesset in the coming month along the model of the Ukrainians,” Bentzi Lieberman, the head of the Yesha settlers’ council, told public radio.
Lieberman said the Israeli population needs ”an electric shock” to stop the evacuation of the 8 000 Gaza settlers due to take place by September next year.
In Gaza itself, a fighter from the radical Palestinian movement Abu Rish Brigades was killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli forces during a fresh military incursion in the southern Khan Yunis region, medics said.
An Israeli military spokesperson said soldiers had killed or injured a Palestinian who was firing at them during an operation aimed at clamping down on mortar attacks on nearby Jewish settlements.
Military sources also said that one Israeli was killed near the border between Israel and the southern West Bank. — Sapa-AFP