TEL AVIV, June 18: Israel has agreed to curb its “track-and-kill” operations against Palestinian militants, in a deal struck with US officials to help them salvage a new peace plan torn by violence, security sources said on Wednesday.
The leading militant group Hamas resumed direct talks later in the day with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas on his bid for a ceasefire to advance the “road map” peace initiative launched by US President George W. Bush on June 4.
Both developments, together with a trouble-shooting visit by US Secretary of State Colin Powell planned for Friday, raised hope the peace plan might survive the latest bloodletting.
Right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sanctioned a helicopter missile strike on Hamas political leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi on June 10. Rantissi survived, but the assassination attempt engulfed US-sponsored peacemaking in turmoil.
Hamas responded by killing 17 Jerusalem bus passengers in a suicide bombing. Israel followed with further air attacks that killed some wanted Hamas men but more bystanders.
The violence boosted powerful foes of negotiated compromise on both sides. Washington demanded restraint.
Truce talks between Abbas and 13 militant groups broke up inconclusively on Tuesday, and moments later Palestinian gunmen killed a young Israeli girl in a car near the West Bank.
But on Wednesday, security sources said Israeli officials agreed in a White House meeting this week that only militants seen as imminent attack threats, and not top political figures with widespread popularity, would be targeted henceforth.
“We have undertaken to limit our track-and-kill operations to terrorists who are definitely ‘ticking bombs’. When it comes to more borderline cases such as Rantissi...we will hold fire as much as possible,” one Israel security source told Reuters.
But Sharon made no mention of concessions in a speech to an international Jewish group. “We will in no way compromise our security,” he said. “Moving forward (on the road map) requires a complete cessation of violence, terrorism and incitement.”
Hamas official Ismail Haniyah derided Israel’s gesture. “It indicates that they will continue assassinations. We reject any classification for who can be assassinated. Assassinations must stop and the occupiers must leave,” he said in Gaza City.
The deal was worked out by Sharon’s chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, in the latest of a series of trips to Washington to resolve disputes over a peace plan that Sharon’s coalition cabinet endorsed only under US pressure.
The road map envisages a Palestinian state by 2005 after a freeze on Jewish settlement building in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and a Palestinian crackdown on militants committed to destroying Israel.
Sharon had ruled out progress on the plan unless Abbas could subdue Hamas, which has spearheaded a 32-month-old revolt.
Hamas officials entered Abbas’s Gaza City compound early on Wednesday evening to resume truce talks. Hamas had severed such contacts after Bush’s June 4 summit with Abbas and Sharon in protest at what it called “unacceptable concessions” by Abbas.
Two militant groups, one within Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, claimed joint responsibility for Tuesday’s attack on the car in which the Israeli girl was shot and her grandfather wounded in central Israel. —Reuters
