May 1, 2003	Thursday	Safar 28, 1424

GAZA CITY, April 30: Radical Palestinian leaders rejected the peace “roadmap” within hours of its publication on Wednesday.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said his group rejected the plan because it risked replacing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with inter-Palestinian strife.

And Islamic Jihad official Mohamed al-Hindi considered that the blueprint called on the Palestinians to make too many “free concessions”.

Gaza-based Haniyeh told AFP “we strongly reject this roadmap because it will give more security to the Zionists and could replace the Israel-Palestinian conflict with an inter-Palestinian confrontation.”

For his part, Hindi said the plan would “push the region back towards the errors of the past, as illustrated by the Oslo peace accords” of 1993.

They were speaking after international diplomats presented the plan, drafted by the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia, to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian premier Mahmud Abbas.

The roadmap sets out the steps toward creation of a Palestinian state with limited sovereignty in Gaza and the West Bank, while Islamic groups want it to be established on the whole of historic Palestine, destroying Israel.

But another Hamas leader said an overnight suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv bar that killed three people was a challenge to Israel, not to the new Palestinian regime.

Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi, who rejected the new prime minister’s pledge to collect all weapons not in the hands of security forces, said the bombing by the group’s armed wing and an offshoot of Abbas’ own Fatah movement was a sign of the militants’ continuing “resistance.”

“The Tel Aviv attack was confirmation that the resistance will continue and the suicide bombings will continue. This is not a challenge to to the Abu Mazen government, it is a challenge to the occupation,” he told AFP, using Abbas’s nom de guerre.

He said the attack on Mike’s Place, a busy bar on Tel Aviv’s waterfront, had probably been planned long before the parliamentary session to approve Abbas’ government, although as a political leader he denied direct complicity in armed attacks.

“I cannot say that the two groups (the Al-Aqsa Martys Brigades and Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades) agreed to prepare the attack in one hour” after Abbas was given a vote of confidence late Tuesday by parliament.

Abbas said he rejected all forms of terrorism and that his security forces were ready to implement an international peace plan that calls for an end to violence.

SHEIKH YASSIN: The Hamas chief on Wednesday vowed no respite in attacks on Israel.

“The road map aims to assure security for Israel at the expense of the security of our people. It is a plan to liquidate the Palestinian cause (for independence). It is rejected by us,” Sheikh Ahmed Yassin told Reuters in Gaza City.

“Our resistance is continuing and it will continue and no one will stop it. We should not drop our weapons before we get our rights,” said Yassin, 65, a wheelchair-bound cleric who scores second in Palestinian opinion polls after Arafat.

Yassin said the roadmap was humiliating to Palestinians.

“Palestinians would be required to liquidate the resistance and disarm themselves and then Israel would be free to give or not to give, to negotiate or not to negotiate,” said Yassin, whose movement rejects a “two-state” solution to the conflict.

Opposition to Palestinian statehood is strong within Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s right-wing coalition and it has objected to the timing and sequence of steps in the roadmap.

“We will pursue resistance and self-defence until the removal of the occupation and settlements from our land, and until our people return,” Yassin said, alluding to Palestinian refugees from wars with Israel since 1948.

Asked if Hamas, which has spearheaded suicide bombings and ambush shootings in the uprising, would give Abbas a chance to make negotiations work, Yassin said: “Why didn’t (Israel) give our people a chance? Why have they not withdrawn and given us a chance to live (normally) on our land?”

He was seated in his home near a wooden sculpture of a map of 1940s-era British Mandate Palestine. Hamas wants all of that territory, including what is now Israel, for an Islamic state.

Hamas heads the opposition to Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, set up under interim peace accords a decade ago that granted Palestinians limited self-rule in parts of Gaza and the West Bank.

Yassin praised the Tel Aviv attack early on Wednesday.

“This is a good and successful operation. When Fatah and Hamas men unite on the battlefield it means our people stick to the choice of resistance and oppose forced disarmament.”—AFP/Reuters