GAZA, January 17 — Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Likud party has ruled out the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Likud’s Political Office, composed of former and current Likud ministers, legislators and senior officials, passed a resolution unanimously Tuesday, rejecting a statement made by Sharon last month in which he expressed support for the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state, the Haaretz newspaper reported yesterday.
Haaretz said the resolution against a Palestinian state was supported by many of Sharon’s party rivals, including supporters of former Premier Benjamin Netanyahu. A final resolution against the establishment of a Palestinian state will be brought before the Likud Central Committee later.
Israel vowed to keep Palestinian President Yasser Arafat confined to the West Bank city of Ramallah, despite the arrest by Palestinian police of the PFLP leader wanted by Israel for the assassination of a Cabinet minister.
Israel voiced skepticism about the detention late on Tuesday of Ahmed Saadat, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which followed the killing of two Jewish settlers that strained a battered cease-fire.
“We want Saadat to bring us Zeevi’s killers. We don’t know where they are hiding,” Arafat told Israel’s Channel Two television in an interview, referring to assassinated right-wing Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi. But Sharon said after a meeting with Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Pique that Arafat was still not doing enough to crack down on hard-liners. “We have not seen any arrests whatsoever — there were no serious arrests,” Sharon said.
Not only did Arafat not get the Israeli nod to leave his Ramallah headquarters, he lost the support of a section of Palestinians by arresting Saadat. Radical Palestinian groups said that the arrest of Saadat was a dangerous development that put the Palestinian Authority in direct opposition to all Palestinian and Islamist factions.
“The authority should know that what it did will put it in full confrontation with all the national and Islamist factions without exception,” PFLP spokesman Maher Al-Taher said in a statement.
Khaled Meshal, head of the politburo of the Hamas movement, said the group would continue its attacks against Israel.
“The resistance will continue in all its forms, including martyrdom attacks. If the Palestinian Authority continues in this path, it will be digging its own grave,” he told reporters.
In further bloodshed, gunmen shot dead an Arab driving an Israeli van in the West Bank in an apparent case of mistaken identity by Palestinians to avenge the death in a bomb blast of Raed Al-Karmi, a leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
