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TEL AVIV, July 5: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says he has worked out a secret peace plan with the Bush administration to end the Middle East conflict, a newspaper said on Friday.
“The general feeling that there exists no plan has helped keep this plan secret,” the Yediot Aharonot newspaper quoted the hardline Israeli leader as telling an economic conference here on Thursday.
“I was therefore able quietly to work for months to reach an understanding with the Americans,” Sharon said, without providing any details about the plan or which US officials he had spoken with.
“We’re interested in putting back on track the peace process, not to create the illusion of a peace process but to reach a real agreement which will bring peace,” Sharon said.
“I decided to take the initiative and change the negative atmosphere in the region and to give a chance for peace,” he said.
He added that “Israel warmly welcomes the principles raised in President Bush’s speech” on the Middle East, referring to a key Middle East policy address given by George W. Bush late last month.
However, a senior aide to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat dismissed Sharon’s “imaginary” peace plan, and said the former general was likely just floating a “trial balloon”.
“These imaginary peace plans and trial balloons will lead to nothing,” Nabil Abu Rudeina said on Friday.
Israeli public radio reported that a Sharon envoy went on a “secret mission” this week to Washington to discuss how to carry out the ideas in Bush’s speech.
In his speech on June 24, Bush called on the Palestinians to change their leaders as a precondition for a Palestinian state in three years.
FREED AFTER SIX YEARS: A Paraguayan woman and her five children, held captive in the West Bank for six years, returned home on Friday, following efforts by the Paraguayan ambassador and the United Nations to secure their release.
Former ballerina Otilia Arce and her children were abandoned by her husband, Palestinian Munir Jaser Mamad Ahmad, in the West Bank and held captive in a Palestinian camp until her mother sought help in negotiating their release a few months ago.
Arce’s captivity was reported by another Paraguayan woman, Raquel Lusardi, who managed to escape the West Bank last year.
Lusardi told reporters she had been held hostage by her husband, Yamil El Khalili, until she escaped with her two children, aged 13 and 15.
Lusardi said that over the four years and eight months she had spent there, she suffered from the horrors of war and her husband’s oppression.
“When we arrived there, his attitude and treatment of me changed completely,” she said.
Lusardi went to the airport to meet Arce in a scene widely covered by local media.
Both women hold Paraguayan passports, but Lusardi noted that the ambassador told her that if they had held Palestinian passports, they “would never have been able to leave.”
Arce’s family and friends formed an impromptu caravan, honking their horns and waving Paraguayan flags en route from the airport to the family’s home. —AFP
