OCCUPIED JERUSALEM/AMMAN, 11 July — An Israeli officer and a Palestinian teenager were killed in separate clashes yesterday despite a lull in violence that has raised hopes for reviving peace talks. The violence came amid efforts to keep incipient Palestinian Authority-Israeli talks on track and inter-Arab consultations ahead of an international gathering next week on the Middle East crisis. The meeting in New York will involve the United States, Russia, European Union and the United Nations.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Noam Katz said Israel saw a narrow "window of opportunity" for resuming a political dialogue amid the lull in violence. In the first Cabinet-level meetings in months, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres met Monday with new Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayad and on Tuesday with new Interior Minister Gen. Abdel Razaq Al-Yahiya. Palestinians expect more high-level meetings.
Another Israeli official said the government was considering unblocking the Palestinian Authority taxes and customs revenues frozen by the Jewish state since violence resumed in earnest in September 2000.
But a senior Palestinian official insisted that Peres had had nothing "serious" to offer in his talks with the new Palestinian interior and finance ministers. "Peres came to these talks without anything in his hand," PA Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo told a press conference in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
The Palestinian Authority would be unable to continue security and other reforms if Washington failed to pressure Israel into lifting its siege of Palestinian land, he warned. "The key is in Washington’s hands. We ask Washington to change its policy (toward Israel) or there will not be reform or any security."
In Amman, Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Moasher said that Arab participants in the talks — Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia — will demand clear "mechanisms" for a peace settlement. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal made a whirlwind tour of Egypt, Syria and Jordan yesterday as he pressed on with inter-Arab consultations ahead of key talks on the Middle East crisis.
On his arrival in Amman, Prince Saud went straight into talks with King Abdallah, Jordanian officials said. The meeting focused on "proposals to relaunch the peace process and advance talks on a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians," an official told reporters without detailing what they were.
The Jordanian king said it was imperative that "the peace plans be translated into practical measures that would put an end to Israeli occupation and create a Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders," the official said.
Earlier in Damascus, Prince Saud met President Bashar Assad to discuss the "international community’s peace proposals," the official Syrian news agency SANA said. And in Egypt, he met President Hosni Mubarak at his northeast Cairo residence as part of consultations to calm the situation in the Palestinian territories, sources close to the presidency said. Neither Prince Saud nor his interlocutors made any statement after their talks.
Prince Saud is set to join Egyptian and Jordanian counterparts Ahmed Maher and Marwan Moasher in talks in New York on July 16 with foreign ministers from the diplomatic "quartet" on the Middle East. He has already visited Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates as part of his whirlwind consultations ahead of Arab League meetings on the Middle East in Cairo tomorrow.
Representatives of 11 members of the League will attend meetings of the follow-up committees for the Arab peace initiative and for the other decisions adopted at the Beirut Arab summit in March 2002. The initiative, based on Saudi proposals and adopted at the Beirut summit, offers Israel a normalization of relations with the Arab states in return for its full withdrawal from the territories it occupied in 1967.
An Israeli Army officer was fatally wounded when gunmen opened fire on his unit in the Gaza Strip and a Palestinian teenager was killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank. Capt. Haim Lev, 24, died of his wounds, Israeli sources said. His unit was on routine patrol searching for tunnels used to smuggle arms across the border with Egypt, when it came under fire from the gunmen on a nearby building.
In the West Bank, Rami Kutush, a 19-year-old refugee, was killed and two other Palestinians wounded by Israeli gunfire on the Askar camp near Nablus, Palestinian medical sources said. Another Palestinian was shot and wounded by Israeli troops in the village of Alar, near Tulkarm, after they imposed a curfew on the village and began search operations, witnesses said.
Israel reoccupied nearly all of the West Bank three weeks ago after suicide bombings and other attacks killed 31 Israelis in three days. They have since launched systematic roundups of Palestinian males. Palestinian security sources said Israeli armored vehicles and troops withdrew yesterday from a building they had occupied close to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah.
Palestinians are also angry over Israel’s closure on Tuesday of a leading moderate’s office at Al Qods University in Arab East Jerusalem, where he is president. Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s top official in Jerusalem, said he had met lawyers to prepare a petition against his eviction from the office, which Israeli authorities alleged was used on behalf of the Palestinian Authority in violation of interim peace deals. Nusseibeh denied the charge.
