PARIS, Aug 25: An international task force on Palestine is presently meeting in Paris under the auspices the French Foreign Ministry to discuss institutional reform of the Palestinian Authority, and notably to take stock of what has happened during the first 100 days of an institutional reform plan unveiled in late June by President Yasser Arafat.

The task force, which is also meeting under the auspices of the Quartette contact group (United States, Russia, United Nations, and European Union), also includes representatives of the Palestinian Territories’ principal creditor countries, Norway and Japan, as well as of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Says Salam Fayad, the former IMF representative in the Palestinian territories who has since been named the Palestinian Authority’s Finance Minister, “We want to send a strong and positive signal to the international community to tell them that the reforms are progressing quite rapidly and notably in the financial sector.”

Considered close to the United States, Mr Fayad is said, according to French diplomatic sources, to have threatened to hand in his resignation as the Palestinian Authority’s new finance minister if he were not allowed a free hand in undertaking a reform plan which on August 15 saw him announce the creation of a Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF) — the only financial institution authorised to manage investments and commercial operations for the Palestinian Territories — and this one month ahead of the timetable established for its creation by the Task Force.

In receiving three members of the Palestinian delegation to the meeting — Yasser Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian Authority’s Minister of culture and information, Maher Al Masri, Minister of the economy, and Nabil Qassia, Coordinator of the Palestinian Committee on Reforms as well as Minister of tourism — Loic Hennekinne, secretary-general of the Quai d’Orsay, noted that the task force would be studying the evolution of reforms in seven different areas: financial transparency, administrative reform, the state of law in the territories, elections (scheduled for early next year), market economy, the state of the civil society, and humanitarian considerations (of the reforms).

With regard to the political situation in the region, “they will also be studying ways,” he noted, “in which a dialogue can be resumed and come up with a political solution to the conflict (with Israel).”

A day earlier, France had severely reprimanded Israel for having grounded an Air France airliner at Ben Gurion International Airport for having carried to Israel a delegation of 50 French peace activists who had been invited to Tel Aviv to take part in a demonstration against Israeli incursions into the Palestinian Territories.