AL QUDS, Nov 6: Tough-talking former Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in as caretaker foreign minister Wednesday as the country prepared for early elections in which he hopes to lead the right to victory.

Only hours before the return to high office of a man who takes a hardline stance on the Palestinian uprising, an armed Palestinian killed two Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip before being shot dead himself.

Netanyahu, who is keen to regain the premiership he held from 1996 to 1999, accepted Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s offer to join his caretaker government ahead of elections to be held early next year.

That set alarm bells ringing among the Palestinians.

“This government is perhaps the worst ever to govern Israel until now, and all those who do not want the peace process and want to pursue the aggression and occupation are part of it,” senior Palestinian official Nabil Shaath said in Cairo.

Newspapers in the Arab world were full of equally grim predictions for the two-year Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

Saudi Arabia’s Al-Madina said “the only winners will be the extremists who will win their mandate on the Arab blood they spill.”

Netanyahu, who is expected to square off soon against Sharon in a bid to lead their right-wing Likud party, immediately hit the campaign trail. He said on public television he regretted Israel had not already expelled Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in retaliation for Palestinian suicide attacks.

Netanyahu said a US strike on Iraq would provide an ideal cover to oust Arafat during the upheaval in the region, but the telegenic, media-savvy heavyweight said a victory on the diplomatic front was as crucial as on the military.

“We must convince world opinion of the righteousness of our cause and win over the battle for world opinion,” he said in his first ministerial address.

“Our enemies have managed through their lies to convince (the world) that they have the right to kill us. We must stop justifying ourselves and re-establish the truth: this is the central goal of our foreign policy,” he said.

Arafat, already effectively isolated from the diplomatic scene by Sharon, tried to strike a defiant note against Netanyahu.

“No one can expel me from my homeland,” he said in Ramallah, where his offices are slowly being rebuilt after an Israeli siege in September. “They must remember that I am president Arafat.”

Netanyahu, who has made no secret of his ambition to run against Sharon in Likud primaries, said the party would win a sweeping victory after the leadership contest is held.

Sharon said Tuesday that early elections had been forced upon him by the “irresponsible” decision of the Labour party last week to scuttle Israel’s national unity government.

He accused Labour of putting “irresponsible political reasons” ahead of national interest by quitting in a row over funding of Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Both Likud and Labour are now gearing up for primaries to select their candidates for premier.

The Likud vote, which the Jerusalem Post daily said must be held by December 5 at the latest, is likely to be a close, cut-throat affair. Meanwhile, Labour leader Binyamin Ben Eliezer is trailing behind two left-wing rivals.

The exact date of the elections will be decided next week by a parliamentary legal committee.

As if to underline the problems any new administration will face, the violence on the ground continued unabated during the internal wrangling over election dates.

A Palestinian gunman from the Islamic radical movement Hamas killed two Jewish settlers before being shot dead near the settlement of Rafah Yam in the southern Gaza Strip.

Israeli government spokesman Avi Pazner said the attack was intended to destabilise the Jewish state at a time when it is facing internal upheavals with the early elections.

Late Tuesday, two young Palestinians were killed by Israeli tank fire in Rafah on the Egypt-Gaza border, after a crowd of youths pelted tanks and bulldozers with stones.

Two other Palestinians were critically wounded.

And a suspected suicide bomber was arrested after a manhunt around Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport.—AFP