The main Palestinian resistance groups in the Gaza Strip met Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday night as the new Palestinian president appealed to them to end attacks on Israeli targets.
Palestinian officials said Abbas met Islamic Jihad leaders on Tuesday night in a secret location and then saw Hamas leaders. He was expected to press them to stop the attacks because they provide a pretext for the Israeli leader, Ariel Sharon, to reject negotiations.
The matter was brought to a head by the Gaza crossing bomb which killed six Israelis last week and the rocketing of Sderot, which left a teenage girl brain dead.
Hamas showed no let-up on Tuesday, carrying out a suicide bombing at a Gaza settlement checkpoint which injured seven people, most of them soldiers.
Israel has given Abbas only a few days to end the attacks before it begins what military sources say will be one of its biggest assaults on the Gaza Strip since the intifada erupted more than four years ago.
”Israel will respond — and how,” Israeli defence minister Shaul Mofaz told Channel 2 television on Tuesday.
The Islamist groups have said that without an Israeli commitment to stop assassinating Palestinian activists and shooting, often indiscriminately, into Gaza refugee camps, there is no reason to believe Sharon is serious about reviving negotiations.
”Unless Israel stops the assassinations and the other killings there is no point in a ceasefire,” a Hamas spokesperson, Sami Abu Zuhiri, said. ”It achieves nothing for the Palestinian people except to make them more vulnerable to Israeli attacks.”
However, on Tuesday night, after meeting Abbas, he said: ”Calm was one of the points raised in the meeting within the framework of stabilising the Palestinian situation. We have listened to Abu Mazen [Abbas] and we will study the issue within the movement.
”Both sides expressed their mutual interest to achieve the interests of our people and maintain national unity. Further meetings are expected in coming days.”
Abbas made no comment after the three-hour meeting.
In the West Bank, a leader of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group in Abbas’s Fatah faction, pledged to halt attacks inside Israel but said it would continue to strike at Israelis in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
”We agree to suspend all military action inside Israel… in order to support Abbas’s political programme,” said Zachariya Zubeidi, the most prominent West Bank leader in the brigades.
Abbas is trying to revive the strategy he followed as prime minister in 2003, when he drew the Islamist groups into a ceasefire — a hudna — in an effort to force Israel back to the negotiating table.
But that proved a bitter experience for Abbas and for the armed groups, making them wary of an unconditional ceasefire.
Sharon said at that time that he was not interested in a truce. He demanded that the Palestinian leadership use force to break the Islamist groups rather than draw them into the political process, and helped bring about the collapse of the hudna with a spate of assassinations of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders.
Israel’s position remains that it does not want a ceasefire and it is again pressing Abbas to set his security forces against the armed groups.
Khalid al-Batsh, a political leader of Islamic Jihad, said it was an attempt to create conflict among the Palestinians.
”We can’t accept Sharon’s pressure, because if we do it means there will be more pressure and demands from the Israelis [and it] will end in civil war between the Palestinians,” he said.
”In the last hudna we gave time to Abu Mazen to discuss what Palestinians would get from Israel. Sharon said he had no interest in the hudna and what he gave us was more assassinations. We stopped our resistance and the Israelis were still killing our people.
”This time, if there is no position from the Americans guaranteeing that Israel will respect the ceasefire, then we have no choice but to go on protecting our people, because there is no one stopping the Israelis.”
Abbas’s allies say there is no future for armed resistance, and that it is only a matter of time before Hamas and similar groups give up the fight.
But the armed Islamist groups fear a truce will look like surrender. – Guardian Unlimited Â