Hamas Says It Will Not Accept Mideast Cease-Fire Proposal
nytimes.com
Right on!
Sharon and the land-grabbers want something for nothing.
JERUSALEM, June 16 — Officials of the militant group Hamas ended two days of scheduled talks with an Egyptian delegation in the Gaza Strip today, and said they were not prepared to accept a Mideast cease-fire proposal, despite strong pressure on the group to suspend its attacks on Israelis.
"Cease-fire means surrender to occupation," a senior Hamas official, Ismail Abu Shanab, told reporters in Gaza.
Representatives of Hamas and other militant groups meeting in Gaza said they had demanded international guarantees for a halt to Israeli military strikes on their leaders before they would agree to stop their own attacks.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, in an address intended to assure Israelis that he would offer no concessions without security guarantees, told Parliament that there could be no peace unless Palestinians cracked down on the militant groups.
"We cannot achieve a political arrangement, and certainly not a peace deal, when terror runs rampant," he told Israeli lawmakers at a special parliamentary session.
In a related development, an American team headed by the diplomat John S. Wolf has arrived for talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and to monitor progress on the international peace plan, known as the road map, which has been jeopardized by the past week of violence that left close to 60 people dead.
The new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, widely known as Abu Mazen, was expected to hold additional talks with the factions in an attempt to arrange a cease-fire.
Israel says it is prepared to pull back its troops in northern Gaza, the scene of repeated clashes with Palestinian militants, if the Palestinian security forces can move in and assume control.
However, Israel has been somewhat vague on how it would respond to a Palestinian cease-fire declaration.
Some Israeli officials say it would be a welcome first step, though they also expect the Palestinians to arrest and disarm militants in accordance with the peace plan.
But Israel's foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, said that a truce would only allow the militant organizations to regroup. "We can't accept this," Mr. Shalom told Israel radio.
Middle East peace efforts have zigged and zagged dramatically in the past two weeks.
On June 4, Mr. Abbas and Mr. Sharon joined President Bush for a summit meeting in Jordan, the most ambitious peace effort since the current period of attacks and counterattacks began in September 2000.
But last week brought a surge of violence and was accompanied by angry promises from both sides of still greater violence to come. In the past three days, pressure from the United States and others has induced the warring parties to restart talks.
The Israeli and Palestinian cabinets held separate sessions on Sunday in which they endorsed the basic principle of having the Palestinians police part of the Gaza Strip, though each side set conditions.
Mr. Sharon said the army would continue to pursue members of the Islamic group Hamas and other Palestinian militants if they were planning to strike Israel. He said he had the backing for the United States.
President Bush, speaking in Kennebunkport, Me., on Sunday, said, "The free world and those who love freedom and peace must deal harshly with Hamas and the killers."
Sen. Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, suggested that American forces might be needed to fight Hamas. In a television interview on Sunday, he said, "Clearly, if force is required, ultimately to rout out terrorism, it is possible that there will be an American participation."
Hamas, which has always opposed peace talks with Israel, has rejected the Mideast peace plan, but it is facing intense pressure to suspend attacks.
The group carried out a suicide bombing on Wednesday that killed 17 people on a Jerusalem bus, including Anna Orgal, 55, identified as the cousin of Daniel C. Kurtzer, the American ambassador to Israel.
The Palestinians, meanwhile, said that they were prepared to take over security in northern Gaza, and that they wanted the Israeli forces to leave other areas in the coastal strip, as well as the West Bank town of Bethlehem. They also want American guarantees that Israel will not reoccupy areas it vacates, and that it will stop the targeted killings.
"We don't want a random Israeli withdrawal," said Nabil Amr, the Palestinian information minister. "It should be based on a political vision."
Meanwhile, Peace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settlements, said Jewish settlers had established five outposts in the West Bank in the past week, though the peace plan calls for recently erected settlements to be dismantled.
"The settlers are nervous, and things are much more tense," said Dror Etkes, a Peace Now official. "But it's the same old story. The construction is still going on."
The Israeli military demolished 10 uninhabited settlements last week, and planned to remove five that had a small number of residents. The settlers have challenged the plan in court, and no action has been taken.
The army took down one additional outpost on Sunday, removing a bus that had been fashioned into living quarters on a hill south of Hebron, in the West Bank, witnesses said. No one was living there. |
