OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 14 July — Israel said yesterday it had delayed indefinitely a meeting with Palestinian ministers to ease security and economic restrictions on Palestinians as right-wing Israeli Environment Minister Zachi Hanegbi told Israel radio Palestinian autonomous areas will be occupied for at least a year.

Sources close to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said the premier had opposed the meeting, arguing that too many talks with the Palestinian Authority risked undermining his efforts to oust Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

In another development, Israel’s Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer will meet Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak next week in an effort to sideline Arafat.

The source said Ben Eliezer would travel to Alexandria on Monday as “part of Israeli efforts to convince the international community, and especially the Arab world, that Arafat must leave the political stage for there to be progress toward peace”. With the backing of the United States, Israeli Prime Minister Sharon has said a return to the negotiating table required a change of Palestinian leadership first.

The Palestinians say Israel’s military measures in the territories preclude an effective reining in of activists.

Preceding Ben Eliezer to Cairo will be Israeli parliamentary speaker Avraham Burg, who is to meet his Egyptian counterpart Fathi Sorour and Egyptian presidential adviser Osama El-Baz today.

On Friday US Secretary of State Colin Powell declared Yasser Arafat persona non grata and shot down a dramatic appeal from him for an end to Israel’s three-week-old reoccupation of West Bank cities. “We will take his points under consideration. I am not now dealing with Chairman Arafat. We are waiting for new leaders to emerge or a new leadership to be designated that we can work with,” Powell told Arab satellite news channel Al-Jazeera.

Arafat had written to the US secretary of state spelling out the reform measures he had already made in response to calls from the international community but suggesting that further steps would not be possible unless Israel eased its military activity in the West Bank.

Palestinian International Cooperation Minister Nabil Shaath said in Cairo yesterday the Palestinian leadership is aiming to convince the United States it is “responsible” and that only Arafat’s administration can achieve peace.

Israeli and Palestinian officials had been due in yesterday’s postponed meeting to discuss easing hardships to Palestinians from Israeli Army blockades, curfews and reoccupation of Palestinian-ruled cities.

Environment Minister Tzahi Hanegbi of the ruling Likud party said yesterday the Israeli Army would stay in Palestinian self-ruled areas until there is a change in the Palestinian leadership. Quoted on Israel Radio, Hanegbi said reoccupation of these areas, established in 1993 under interim accords, could last up to a year.

The Israeli Army is now deployed in seven Palestinian-ruled cities, including Qalqilya where an army spokeswoman said soldiers had discovered a car packed with explosives trying to pass into Israel at a checkpoint south of the city.

Some 500 mourners in Jenin marched in the funeral of Imad Abu Zahra, 35, a freelance photographer who died after being shot earlier in the week when Israel’s Army unexpectedly reinstated a curfew in the West Bank city.

The army announced yesterday it was lifting daytime curfews on three more Palestinian cities — Bethlehem, Hebron and Jenin — but warned that it could reimpose them at any moment.

In other developments, a Palestinian teenager, Dazir Hantouli, was wounded yesterday by Israeli fire as the army moved into more West Bank villages. At least eight Israeli armored-personnel carriers and jeeps rolled into the town, which lies some 17 km south of Jenin, when a group of Palestinian youths began hurling rocks at them, Abu Diak said.