Arafat-Peres meeting in doubt, again
( 2001-09-23 16:10 ) (7 )

The Israeli cabinet weighed on Sunday whether to give a green light to high-level truce talks with the Palestinians that could help US efforts to forge an anti-terror alliance with Muslim and Arab states.

Palestinian officials said talks between Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat had been scheduled for 5 p.m. (1400 GMT) at Gaza airport.

Peres has been publicly pushing to meet Arafat, saying Israel owed the United States a debt of gratitude for decades of support.

But Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who called Arafat a terrorist in a CNN interview on Friday, came under pressure from right-wing ministers to scrap the meeting.

Sharon has demanded 48 hours of quiet as a condition for the talks, aimed at cementing a tenuous ceasefire announced last Tuesday.

The level of fighting in a nearly year-long Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation has dropped signficantly since the truce went into effect but violence has continued.

"This is a democracy...it is not one man who decides alone," Raanan Gissin, a Sharon spokesman, told Reuters as the cabinet convened for its weekly session.

"The ministers will voice their opinions, assessments will be based on the intelligence reports and after that there will be a decision," Gissin said.

Right-wing minister Natan Sharansky met Sharon before the cabinet session to press him to block the Peres-Arafat meeting.

"The prime minister said he does not agree there should be a meeting today," Sharansky told Israel Radio.

INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE

The international community has put Arafat and Peres under pressure to reach an accommodation and help attract Muslim nations into a broad coalition to fight global terrorism after the devastating September 11 attacks on the United States.

During a preparatory meeting on Saturday, delegations from the two sides drafted a joint statement to be issued at the close of the Peres-Arafat talks, Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper reported on its website late on Saturday.

In a tentative sign the truce may be taking root, members of the militant Hamas group and other Palestinian officials said Hamas was willing to suspend suicide attacks inside Israel "in the coming period" unless it was provoked by the Jewish state.

But a night-time Palestinian mortar bomb attack on a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip followed by an Israeli tank incursion into a nearby Palestinian town threatened to dash hopes pinned on the relative calm.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said Palestinians had fired two mortar bombs at the Kfar Darom settlement but caused no casualties. Shortly afterwards, two Israeli tanks rumbled some 500 metres (yards) into the town of Deir al-Balah under a heavy cover of machinegun volleys, Palestinian security sources said.

Israeli military sources said the army entered Deir al-Balah to scan the area after the mortar bomb attack and came under Palestinian fire.

MEETING SAID TO BE 'VERY SUCCESSFUL'

Earlier, a senior Israeli political source described as "very successful" the preparatory meeting between Peres, a small Israeli delegation and senior Palestinian negotiators who set the agenda for the meeting on Sunday and drew up the joint statement.

"If there are no exceptional security incidents, the meeting will take place," the source said.

He declined to say where the meeting would be held.

The Ha'aretz website report said the joint statement, intended to lay the groundwork for further talks, expressed the commitment of both sides to the ceasefire and the implementation of a US-led truce-to-talks plan.

The plan, proposed by an international committee led by former US senator George Mitchell, calls for a cessation of violence followed by confidence-building measures that include a freeze in Jewish settlement building, and eventual peace talks.

In the meantime, Ha'aretz reported, Israel and the Palestinians would renew security cooperation and Israel would ease its blockade on Palestinian areas where calm prevails. Israeli troops also would redeploy to positions held before the uprising began last September.

Peres and Arafat, both Nobel Peace Prize winners, have met several times since the Palestinian revolt broke out in the West Bank and Gaza Strip after peace talks stalled. Their previous efforts have failed to staunch the bloodshed.

At least three Palestinians and one Israeli have been killed since the truce began, bringing the overall death toll to at least 586 Palestinians and 168 Israelis.

Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo listed key issues for the success of a Peres-Arafat meeting.

They were: a timetable for the implementation of the US-backed truce-to-talks plan under international supervision, the lifting of the Israeli blockade on Palestinian areas, a freeze on the establishment of a buffer zone on a section of the border between the West Bank and Israel proper, and an Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem.