July 30, 2002	Tuesday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 19,1423

AL QUDS: New details of a proposed ceasefire deal — and an end to suicide bombing attacks on Israeli civilians — approved by all the main Palestinian factions have emerged amid Palestinian accusations that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon deliberately approved the bombing of a Gaza apartment block to prolong the conflict.

As Hamas moved quickly this weekend to appoint a new military commander to replace Salah Shehada, who was killed in last week’s bombing along with 14 other people, including nine children, Hamas’s senior political leader in Gaza, Aziz Rantisi, made clear that his organization was back at war.

Commenting on the unnamed commander’s new mission, he said: “We hope that God blesses you and gives you the power to avenge us every day and everywhere — in Haifa, in Tel Aviv and Hadera”. Israelis have already tasted the first lashes of vengeance for the Gaza carnage.

On Thursday a Jewish settler was killed in his car in a Palestinian ambush near the West Bank Palestinian city of Qalqiliya. On Friday four more settlers were slain — including a couple and their child — in a similar attack near Hebron. These were the ‘first responses’ to the Gaza bombing, said the various Palestinian militias who claimed them. More — and worse — will almost certainly follow.

Although Israel was quick to dismiss the proposed ceasefire, which it said Sharon was aware of when he approved the Gaza attack, details of the European-brokered ceasefire plan, disclosed to The Observer, have revealed that last week’s bombing derailed the most serious effort in 12 months to find a way of halting the increasing bloodshed.

Many Palestinians believe this is what Sharon wants: the continuation of a vengeful war ‘without rules’ to maintain a domestic Israeli consensus behind his policies of military reconquest in the West Bank.

As evidence, they point out that at the very moment that the bomb was slamming through the roof of Shehada’s apartment in Gaza, leaders from the Tanzim — the ‘field organization’ of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement and the most powerful Palestinian faction in the occupied territories — were meeting in the West Bank to put the finishing touches to a statement calling for a unilateral Palestinian ceasefire.

The Tanzim’s leader, Marwan Barghouti, who is currently languishing in an Israeli prison on charges of terrorism, had already approved the ceasefire call, say Fatah sources. But the bombing changed all that.

According to Palestinian sources the statement had been the fruit of two months of discussions between Tanzim leaders, the other Palestinian factions (including Hamas) and diplomats from the European Union, Egypt, Jordan and also Saudi Arabia.

Published on 24 July in Israel’s largest-circulation Yediot Aharonot newspaper, it said, “Tanzim and Fatah from this moment on will cease all attacks on innocent (Israeli) men, women and children who are non-combatants”.

Moreover, the statement called on “all Palestinian organizations and movements to cease these attacks immediately, without hesitation or preconditions”.

The second sentence was aimed largely at Hamas.

And it was a message, it is now clear, that was being taken on board.

On 22 July — hours before the attack carried out on Gaza — Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, had said Hamas would stop killing Israeli civilians if Israel were to withdraw from recently reoccupied Palestinian cities, release recently detained Palestinian prisoners and end the assassination of its leaders.

But the ceasefire is now buried under the rubble of the Gaza apartments.

“Sharon has wasted a golden opportunity,” says Hatem Abdul Khader, a Fatah leader involved in the ceasefire negotiations with both Hamas and foreign diplomats. “With such an agreement we could have saved the lives not just of Palestinians but also Israelis”.

The Israeli government rejects the charge that the bombing in Gaza was deliberately timed to sink the ceasefire initiative.

“Of course, we knew about it,” said Sharon’s spokesman, Rannan Gissin. “So what? It would have been one more (ceasefire) declaration. Their declarations have never held, and it wouldn’t have held this time. Not for one moment did the warnings of attacks diminish.”—Dawn/The Observer News Service.