Mahmoud Abbas, the newly elected Palestinian president, faced his first big test on Thursday night when Palestinian militants detonated a bomb on the edge of the Gaza Strip, killing at least five Israelis.
The attack, by far the biggest since he was elected on Sunday, blatantly defied his call for an end to the violence and a revival of some form of peace process with Israel.
The explosives were packed into a truck which the militants drove into the Karni crossing into Gaza at around 11pm. Two Palestinians stormed the Israeli positions at the crossing at the same time. At least three of the Palestinians died.
The crossing is a heavily guarded conduit for cargo and farm produce and the attack will be considered a bad security breach. Israeli helicopters quickly hit back, firing missiles into a Gaza refugee camp.
Rescue workers said the five Israeli dead all appeared to be civilians.
One of the factions involved was the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, part of Abbas’ Fatah movement.
Earlier the Israeli government had stressed that the onus was on Abbas to prove that he could keep militant factions in check.
”The question now is whether he has the will and determination to bring Palestinian terror to an end,” the foreign minister, Silvan Shalom said
Abbas has made it clear that he wants the violence to stop so that peace initiatives can start again.
”The road map starts with security commitments and then moves on to final-status issues … We are ready to implement our commitments,” he said on Thursday.
But another faction involved in Thursday night’s attack said it demonstrated that ”the enemy will leave the Gaza Strip under fire from the strikes of the Palestinian resistance”.
The transfer of power to Abbas, coupled with Israel’s plan to withdraw settlements from Gaza, has brought a flurry of diplomacy in the West. But Tony Blair is being forced to rethink the agenda for his proposed Middle East conference in London after Palestinians questioned its worth and accused him of being pro-Israeli.
Although the Palestinians will not join the Israelis in boycotting the March 1-2 conference, and have welcomed a British promise to draft a new agenda, politicians and officials in Ramallah, the West Bank headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, continue to be sceptical.
The authority raised its concerns with the British consul general in east Jerusalem, John Jenkins, and with Downing Street.
Blair is to send his foreign policy adviser, Nigel Sheinwald, to Ramallah for further discussions before the end of the month.
A spokesperson for the consul general’s office said: ”The content is still up for discussion.”
Qais Abdul Karim, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation central committee, said on Thursday: ”I do not think the Palestinians are in a position to boycott anything, but I do not think the conference is politically meaningful. It will be attended with very little interest or hope on the Palestinian side.”
The Palestinians accuse Blair of having adopted an Israeli agenda by suggesting that the conference should concentrate on the reform of Palestinian institutions, especially its security services, as a first step to negotiations with Israel.
They accept a need for reform, but not as a precondition for peace negotiations.
The mood was not helped by their belief that Elliot Abrahams, George Bush’s Middle East coordinator, privately dismissed the conference as window dressing. The British have since assured the Palestinians this is not Abrahams’s view.
A PLO official said: ”We will have to jump through lots of hoops and have nothing to show for it. It is all about the Palestinians having to reform their judiciary, economy and politics, not about the real cause of the conflict, the Israeli occupation.” – Guardian Unlimited Â