AL QUDS, May 4: A senior US official, launching talks on a peace “roadmap”, said on Sunday Israel should ease a military clampdown on Palestinians to encourage them to crack down on militants behind violence.
Assistant Secretary of State William Burns was preparing the ground for the most concerted international peace drive in the region since the US-brokered Camp David talks collapsed in mid-2000. Palestinians rose up against Israel soon afterwards.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell is due in Israel and the Palestinian territories later this week for the first time in 13 months to build on the swearing in of reformist Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.
Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, told reporters he was seeking a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on implementing the “roadmap” to peace presented by the United States and three other international mediators last week.
Sharon has said he would welcome talks with Abbas, a former peace negotiator he has met in the past. Sharon will head negotiations with the Palestinians himself and may resume contacts with Abbas shortly, Israeli media said on Sunday.
The radio, quoting a senior official, said the meeting should take place after Israel’s Independence Day celebrations on Wednesday.
Burns preceded Powell to glean remarks from each side on the “roadmap”, which calls for an end to violence in a 31-month-old Palestinian uprising, a freeze in Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank and Gaza and a Palestinian state by 2005.
Burns said US President George W. Bush and Powell envisaged steps that “Israel can consider in its own self-interest to reinforce important steps on the Palestinian side to act decisively against terror and violence.
“Obviously the humanitarian situation for Palestinians is a very difficult one, and we very much hope that concrete steps can be taken to ease that,” Burns told reporters after talks with Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom.
Burns was due to meet Sharon and Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz later in the day, then Abbas and his security minister Mohammed Dahlan on Monday. He will not see Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who the United States and Israel have sought to sideline over his failure to rein in militants.
Sharon’s right-wing coalition says the peace plan does not put sufficient onus on Palestinians to disarm and jail militants before Israel pulls troops out of Palestinian cities or suspends settlement on occupied territory.
Spelling out a bedrock argument it is likely to make to Powell and Abbas, Israel said it wanted more than just a truce with Palestinian militants.
“As for the contacts with the Palestinians, the prime minister emphasised that Israel is not talking about a ceasefire in terrorist activities but a real war on terrorism,” an Israeli cabinet statement said.
Abbas, who took office on Wednesday, has vocally opposed violence as a means to political ends. He has called it counterproductive and said only Palestinian Authority security services should carry arms.
Appointed by a reluctant Arafat under intense international pressure for democratic reforms, Abbas will have trouble seeing off militant groups without concomitant improvements in the lives of ordinary people, analysts and diplomats say.
SETTLEMENTS: The Israeli army has postponed indefinitely the removal of ten Jewish settler “outposts” in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, the daily Ha’aretz reported on Sunday.
The army gave no reason behind the cancellation which stated that the outposts were erected in the immediate area of the larger settlements by radical settlers and have been deserted by their inhabitants. In the past month, the army demolished two out of 12 such outposts.
All settlements on occupied Palestinian land are illegal according to international law. Though the outposts are mostly erected as protest actions without permission from the Israeli government, the inhabitants are nonetheless protected from attacks by militant Palestinians.—Reuters/dpa