WASHINGTON/BETHLEHEM, 7 May — The Kingdom is not yet convinced of the need for an international Middle East peace conference of the kind proposed last week, Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said yesterday as Israeli troops killed several Palestinians and stepped up house-to-house search in Bethlehem.
Prince Saud said after talks with Powell at the State Department that the idea that came out of the quadripartite meeting was being looked at. He was referring to a proposal from the international diplomatic “quartet” on the Middle East that was outlined by US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
“The conference or a meeting is not an objective in itself, it depends on what that meeting includes and until these ideas are cleared, I don’t think we can give an opinion on that. But it is not a bad idea if the content is the proper content.” He stressed the need for Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian areas before taking further peace initiatives.
Powell announced plans for the conference on Thursday after a meeting of the “quartet” which includes the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.
At the time, Powell said the conference — to be held at the foreign minister level and referred to by some as a “meeting” — would be held in the early summer and would cover a wide range of issues including security, economic reform, humanitarian issues and political negotiations.
Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, currently in Morocco, yesterday spoke to French President Jacques Chirac on phone and discussed the situation in the Middle East. Prince Abdullah and Chirac discussed the latest developments. The crown prince congratulated the French president on his landslide election victory over Jean-Marie Le Pen.
In other developments, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon held talks with Powell and US President George W. Bush urged all parties to the Middle East conflict — Israelis, Palestinians and Arab governments — to lead the region toward peace. Bush again voiced his “high level of disappointment” with Arafat’s leadership.
“He has disappointed me,” Bush said. “He must lead. He must show the world that he believes in peace.”
The president’s spokesman, Ari Fleischer, however signaled that Washington would continue to work with Arafat.
Sharon is persuading the United States to freeze Arafat out of Middle East peacemaking and push for Palestinian Authority reforms.
In Washington, Sharon and Powell discussed the standoff at Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity and negotiators’ struggle to find a swift end to the Israeli Army’s 35-day siege there.
In Bethlehem, negotiators struggled yesterday to hammer out the final details of a deal to end the standoff at the church.
Powell said Palestinians and Israelis were close to an agreement that would lift Israel’s siege but a spokesman for the Catholic Church’s Franciscan order said he had been told the talks had stalled.
Sources close to the negotiators said the two sides remained at odds over how many of the dozens of Palestinian gunmen holed up inside the church would be sent into exile abroad and how many would be transferred to the Gaza Strip.
In Rome, Italian Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini ruled out yesterday the possibility that Palestinian activists holed up inside Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity could be exiled to Italy.
“As far as I know, the Italian government has not said it was open to welcoming Palestinians accused of attacks,” Fini, number two in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government, told journalists.
US and EU negotiators have proposed exiling six of the more than 120 Palestinian activists trapped in the church to Italy.
Israeli troops stepped up house-to-house searches in Bethlehem after finding that a list of gunmen it believed were holed up in the Church of the Nativity was incomplete, military sources said yesterday.
“They are searching all over,” one source told Reuters, alluding to neighborhood searches in the past few days. He declined to elaborate.
Israeli troops besieging the church have used everything from high-tech surveillance blimps to psychological warfare to identify Palestinians sheltering in the church.
When that did not work, Palestinian negotiators said, Israeli negotiators pressed Palestinian counterparts to cough up the names of everyone in the church, where about 200 people took refuge on April 2 to evade Israeli’s West Bank offensive.
In the United Nations, spokesman Jan Fischer said yesterday the United Nations General Assembly will meet today in special emergency session on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.
The session was called at the request of Sudan, this month’s chairman of the Arab group of nations at the UN, and was prompted by failure of the Security Council to react to Israel’s rejection of a UN fact-finding mission to the Jenin refugee camp.
Strictly speaking, the meeting is a resumption of an emergency session which was first called in April 1997 and has been suspended six times since then. Fischer did not say how long the meeting would last, but the two previous sessions -- convened in October 2000 and in December 2001 -- lasted one day. Both ended with resolutions condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories.
In fresh incursions, Israeli tanks occupied the northern and eastern sectors of the West Bank town of Tulkaram and an adjacent refugee camp, witnesses said.
In two separate incidents, the army reported shooting dead activists who tried to break through Israel’s cordon of the volatile Gaza Strip.
In one incident, two activists succeeded and were killed after they slipped into southern Israel near the Kissufim crossing point, the army said.
Palestinian sources identified them as Hazen Al-Wadya, 22, and Mahrus Al-Bahtiti, 20, both members of the armed wing of Islamic Jihad. In Kissufim two Palestinians were killed in fight with Israeli troops.
The Al-Quds Brigades, the Islamic Jihad’s armed wing, warned in a statement issued in Lebanon that the battle showed “that we are continuing the fight against the occupation with all our strength.”
