AL QUDS, Dec 16: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has told ministers ahead of a major policy speech that Israel must be ready to quit Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, senior political sources said on Tuesday.
Sharon, for decades the champion of the settler movement, has been firming up hints that Israel will have to leave parts of Gaza and the West Bank whatever the fate of a struggling US-backed plan for peace with the Palestinians.
Egyptian truce-mediators returned to Gaza on Tuesday for talks with Palestinian factions who rejected a ceasefire widely seen as crucial to the “road map”, but Israel ruled out joining any truce as the militant groups demand.
Raising further doubt over whether Washington’s favoured plan could work, the political sources said Sharon had forecast the Palestinian government would last only six months and then Israel would have to act alone.
Sharon’s comments came as he briefed ministers on Monday on a keenly awaited speech he is due to deliver to a conference on national security on Thursday.
“Whichever way you look at it, Jews won’t be living in the Gaza Strip forever,” one source quoted Sharon as saying. Local newspapers also carried the report.
The Gaza settlers are among the most exposed on land occupied since the 1967 war. Some 7,000 heavily guarded Jews live surrounded by more than one million Palestinians.
Recent polls suggest 60 percent of Israelis would support leaving all Gaza settlements, though any plan to uproot them would be likely to draw fire within Sharon’s right-wing Likud.
Palestinians would welcome any withdrawal but are suspicious it could be under a go-it-alone plan that would also mean Israel setting borders for Palestinians on only part of the land they seek for a state.
Political sources said Sharon was likely to flesh out proposals for unilateral Israeli moves if the road map fails, but he would try to assuage concerns in the United States, the Jewish state’s main ally, that anything could happen very soon.
ARAFAT: Palestinian President Yasser Arafat said on Tuesday he hoped to make his first Christmas visit to Bethlehem in three years, but Israel said it was unlikely to let him go.
Asked by reporters at his battered headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah whether he wanted to travel to the city of Jesus’s birth for holiday festivities, Arafat replied: “I hope so. You know that I never missed this opportunity until they (Israel) imposed a siege on this compound.”
But a senior Israeli official told Reuters the government saw no reason to change a policy that has confined Arafat to his headquarters for nearly two years — Arafat is allowed to leave the compound but without guarantees he can return.—Reuters