Israel has decided to suspend all contacts with the Palestinian Authority following a shooting attack that killed three Jewish settlers in the West Bank, Israeli security sources said on Monday.
”It has been decided to suspend all coordination contacts with the Palestinians,” the sources told Agence France Presse.
Israeli and Palestinian officials had been due to hold a series of meetings in the coming days to prepare the groundwork for a summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.
‘Sabotage’
Three Israelis were killed and another four wounded on Sunday in a drive-by shooting close to the major Gush Etzion Jewish settlement bloc in the southern West Bank.
Shortly afterwards, another Israeli was moderately to seriously injured in a second roadside shooting which took place near the West Bank town of Ramallah.
The first fatal Palestinian attack since last month’s Gaza Strip pull-out was followed shortly afterwards by the killing by Israeli soldiers of a local militant leader in the northern West Bank.
An anonymous caller from a cell of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a Palestinian militant group which is meant to be observing a ceasefire, claimed responsibility for the shooting at the junction near Gush Etzion, which is frequently used by hitch-hikers.
Military sources and local council officials confirmed that three people had been killed in the attack. The shrouded bodies could be seen loaded into the back of an ambulance, an AFP correspondent reported.
In a second violent incident further north, another settler was injured when militants in a car opened fire towards him as he was walking with his father on a road near the Eli settlement just north of Ramallah.
Medics said a 14-year-old boy was moderately to seriously injured while his father escaped unharmed.
”These terror organisations are continuing to sabotage… the process which everyone wants to happen: the process of dialogue with the Palestinians,” Mofaz told Israel public television.
”We cannot continue this process if the Palestinian Authority doesn’t take practical and active steps against the terror organisations,” he said.
”The Palestinian Authority has to move from the stage of words to one of actions, of one authority, of one law and one gun, to a stage of activity against those terror organisations.”
The claim of responsibility from al-Aqsa, a group which is loosely linked to the governing Fatah faction, will be an embarrassment for Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas who is under pressure to institute a crackdown on militant groups.
Abbas is due to hold talks with United States President George Bush and French President Jacques Chirac this week, both of whom are hoping that the pull-out from Gaza should serve as an opportunity to revitalise the peace process.
The moderate Palestinian leader has been a frequent critic of the use of violence during the five-year uprising but he has refrained from a head-on clash with the armed factions for fear of sparking a civil war.
Government spokesperson Avi Pazner said that Israel viewed the attack ”extremely seriously” especially as it appeared to have been perpetrated by an offshoot of Abbas’s Fatah movement.
”What has happened shows the need to disarm these organisations, something which he [Abbas] has not done until now,” said Pazner.
”It will be difficult for him to explain [to Bush] why he has not done this.”
However the local Israeli army commander for the area cast doubt on the claim by al-Aqsa, saying that the area was better known as a Hamas stronghold.
”I think the likelihood that it was al-Aqsa is no more than 50%,” said Colonel Nitzan Alon.
Municipal leaders in Gush Etzion said that the attack highlighted the folly of the army’s recent easing of access for Palestinians on some roads in the West Bank.
”We want the IDF [army] to bring back all the roadblocks in our area,” said Gush Etzion regional council chief Shaul Goldstein.
Israel has said that it will continue to take matters into its own hands in the West Bank, in the absence of firm action against militants by the Palestinian Authority.
A military source confirmed that soldiers had shot a Palestinian gunman who had opened fire on what she termed a routine patrol in a village near the northern West Bank city of Jenin.
Palestinian security sources said that the victim, 27-year-old Islamic Jihad activist Abu Ghanem, was killed by a special forces unit.
The latest deaths brought the overall toll since the September 2000 outbreak of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, to 4 847, according to an AFP count. – AFP
