OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 31 October — Despite renewed US insistence, Israel refused yesterday to pull its tanks back from threatening positions in and around five Palestinian towns after failed security talks with the Palestinians, but tensions still cooled after a flare-up in violence.
Israel accused the Palestinians of reneging on promises made in earlier truce talks to arrest suspected extremists determined to derail any lasting cease-fire efforts. Defense spokesman Yarden Vatikai said that during the US-sponsored talks in Tel Aviv late Monday, "the Palestinians refused to commit to arresting terrorists, which is a necessary condition for further Israeli withdrawals from autonomous Palestinian sectors."
The Palestinians condemned Israel’s refusal to leave the West Bank towns. "This meeting came to nothing because of Israel’s refusal to pull out of these towns, to lift the siege and stop the killings," Palestinian preventative security chief Col. Jibril Rajoub said. "We agreed on nothing, and there is no reason to hold a further meeting of this type, unless Israel changes its stance and renounces force", he added.
Israel invaded six West Bank towns following the Oct. 17 assassination of its Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi by a hard-line Palestinian group. It pulled out of battle-scarred Bethlehem on Sunday night following a tripartite security meeting at the weekend but not before destroying the edifice of the town. Procedures for a further withdrawal, from Nablus, Ramallah, Jenin, Tulkarem and Qalqilya, should have been agreed at Monday’s failed meeting.
Israeli tanks and bulldozers emerging from a Jewish settlement yesterday raided Palestinian farmland just south of Gaza City, Palestinian security officials said. The tanks and bulldozers penetrated around one kilometer into the autonomous Palestinian sector after crossing from the Netzarim settlement, destroying grape vines and other agricultural land, the officials told AFP. No incident had been reported prior to the incursion.
They also destroyed at least four Palestinian houses in the Beit Hanina and Shofat districts of occupied East Jerusalem, an AFP reporter at the scene said. Hussein Kiswani arrived at his house in Beit Hanina early yesterday to see Israeli bulldozers leveling the 320-square-meter building, which he said had cost him two years and $90,000 to build. As he looked on, the diggers meticulously shoveled earth over the rubble of the building, burying it all apart from occasional outcrops of masonry sticking through the dirt. On Monday, Israeli tanks from Kfar Darom settlement moved 200 meters into an autonomous Palestinian area near Deir El-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials and witnesses said.
In Rome, Pope John Paul yesterday called for the cessation of violence in the Middle East and a resumption of peace talks during an audience with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, a Vatican spokesman said. "He expressed his condolences for the numerous victims of the interminable spiral of violence, and renewed his call for all to abandon weapons and return to negotiations," Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said.
