The Israeli Cabinet lifted its bar on contacts with the Palestinian Authority (PA) on Wednesday as the new Palestinian leadership appealed for cooperation with its attempts to curb attacks from the Gaza Strip.
Israeli and Palestinian security officials were expected to meet to discuss arrangements for the deployment of Palestinian forces along the Gaza border while the new President of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, continued his attempts to persuade Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other armed groups to agree to a ceasefire.
At the same time as approving the resumption of contacts with the PA — broken off after a bomb attack on a Gaza border post killed six Israelis last week — Israel’s Security Cabinet also authorised a major military operation in the Gaza Strip if Abbas fails to win a truce from resistance groups or find other means to curb the attacks on Israeli targets.
Hamas and its allies have said they will not agree to a truce without a guarantee that Israel will halt its assassinations and other attacks on them.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is not prepared to give any such assurance. He wants Abbas to disarm Islamist groups, not negotiate with them.
But Palestinian officials said on Wednesday that Abbas has accepted that Hamas and Islamic Jihad need some form of guarantee and he was attempting to work out a formula.
The head of Palestinian forces in Gaza, General Abdel Razek Majaide, said he will deploy men along the Gaza border before the end of the week to prevent rocket attacks against the Israeli town of Sderot. One attack there last week left a teenage girl brain dead.
But Palestinian security force leaders said it will be made more difficult without Israeli cooperation when, for instance, Palestinian troops are operating within range of Israeli military posts. But the Islamist groups say that without an Israeli commitment to stop assassinating Palestinian activists and shooting into Gaza refugee camps, there is no reason to believe that Sharon is serious about reviving negotiations.
”Unless Israel stops the assassinations … there is no point in a ceasefire,” Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhiri said. ”It achieves nothing for the Palestinian people except to make them more vulnerable to Israeli attacks.
”The Israelis are refusing to admit the rights of our people and there’s no pressure from the international community, so resistance must continue.”
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 the armed groups, and it has made 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, and he helped bring about the collapse of the hudna with a spate of assassinations.
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 are also wary of an early ceasefire, because they are concerned that a truce will look like surrender at a time when they are claiming the Israeli government’s plan to pull Jewish settlers and troops out of the Gaza Strip as a victory for the resistance.
”Sharon talked about netzarim [settlement] being as much a part of Israel as Tel Aviv. Now he has changed his mind. It wasn’t 15 years of negotiations that made Sharon change his mind, it was four years of intifada,” Al-Batsh said. — Â