TEL AVIV, Dec 28: Israeli forces lifted their blockade of the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Friday, offering another glimmer of hope for a return to peace talks after 15 months of bloodshed but with scattered violence continuing.

The calm in the occupied territories was blighted after an armed Palestinian of the Islamic Jihad was shot dead overnight by Israeli patrol in the northern Gaza Strip, an Israeli army spokesman said.

The gunman, apparently setting out for a suicide attack, may have attempted the first violation of Jihad’s recent promises to halt attacks against Israeli targets.

The body was recovered by soldiers on the road leading to the Jewish settlement of Netzarim, the spokesman said, adding that the dead man was carrying an anti-tank rocket, a Kalashnikov rifle and a belt of explosives.

In another incident, Israeli soldiers opened fire and seriously injured a Palestinian woman in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, medical sources said. There were no clashes or shooting beforehand, witnesses added.

Nonetheless, the fruit of the relative dip in violence over the past two weeks could be seen in a new opinion poll showing that nearly two out of three Israelis back the rough framework of a peace plan by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and leaked to the media on Dec 23.

But Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dashed hopes for the plan.

“Nothing will come of this plan. It no longer exists. The fact it was presented to the public sealed its burial,” Sharon was quoted in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper on Friday as saying.

“It is an imaginary and inapplicable plan because there is no chance that the Palestinians will cease their terrorist actions within eight weeks,” he said.

Sharon belittled the plan as “dangerous for Israel” and crossing the boundaries of the contacts Sharon authorized between Peres and Palestinian parliamentary speaker Ahmed Qorei.

Meanwhile, a poll released by a Palestinian think tank showed that 71 per cent of Palestinians want to return to talks with Israel, with 60 per cent backing the Dec 16 call by their leader, Yasser Arafat, for an end to armed attacks against Israel.

Despite the latest violence, tensions generally continued to ease on the ground, with a military spokesman saying residents of Bethlehem would now be free to exit and enter the self-rule city, despite still being submitted to checkpoints.

The move to end the blockade on Bethlehem, aimed to allow Christians to celebrate the Christmas season in the holy city, came after Sharon said for the first time on Thursday that Arafat’s Palestinian Authority was making progress in its crackdown on extremists.

Despite their ban on suicide attacks, Hamas denounced on Thursday the new Israeli-Palestinian detente and called for an escalation of violence.

And a Hamas spokesman in the Lebanese city of Tyre said on Friday the group’s decision to stop suicide bombings inside Israel was only “temporary.”

Ali Baraka said the halt to anti-Israel suicide operations and mortar attacks “will not last long, as it is only a temporary measure to protect national unity and avoid a civil war.”

“We continue to assert that this temporary measure is bound to the Zionist enemy’s halt to the massacre of civilians,” Baraka said.

He also called on the Palestinian Authority to “stop all its measures against the resistance,” speaking about the recent wave of arrests of active militants, including many Hamas members.

In the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, another armed group signed up to Arafat’s ceasefire call, though on the condition that Israel not assassinate any more Palestinian militants, 60 of whom have been killed since the outbreak of the uprising.

The Abu Rish faction, linked to Arafat’s Fatah group, has decided to “give a chance” to Arafat’s peace efforts despite the view that all hope in a peaceful settlement has been lost, its leader said.

“We are going to respect the calm because we are conscious of the heavy American pressure on Arafat,” said Abu Mahmud.

“If Israel respects the ceasefire, we will do the same, but we doubt highly that it will last, because Israel is a state thirsty for blood.”

Abu Mahmud predicted that Israel “would not allow this period of calm to pass without leading an operation aimed at wrecking the peace.”

He denounced the “daily efforts of provocation on the part of Israelis.

“They fire heavy weapons to try to provoke us to reply, but we are not going to offer them that,” he said.

Meanwhile, in a peaceful show of solidarity, around 2,000 Israelis and Palestinians marched shoulder-to-shoulder in Jerusalem, chanting slogans for peace and for an end to the Jewish occupation of Palestinian lands.—AFP