RAMALLAH, West Bank, 29 October — Palestinian President Yasser Arafat delayed the ratification of his long-awaited new Cabinet yesterday after Israel prevented some Palestinian lawmakers from attending the session.
Arafat, under pressure at home and abroad to make sweeping reforms, had planned to use yesterday’s meeting of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) in the West Bank city of Ramallah to announce and win parliamentary approval for his new Cabinet.
But the session was put off after lawmakers and a Cabinet minister were stopped at a Gaza Strip checkpoint.
"There is no (PLC) meeting today because Israel has prevented 13 Gaza deputies from attending the session in Ramallah," a senior Palestinian official said. "We hold Israel responsible for trying to sabotage our reform effort."
Ibrahim Abu Al-Naja, deputy speaker of the PLC, told Reuters in Gaza that Israel had backtracked on a promise to let all 85 lawmakers reach Ramallah.
In Tulkarm, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead by machine gun fire from an Israeli tank yesterday as youths stoned an army column during curfew, Palestinian security officials said.
Ahmed Ombus, 16, was killed at the entrance to the Tulkarm refugee camp.
The army reported that an unidentified Palestinian man had been shot dead while trying to plant explosives strapped to a gas canister by a road in Tulkarm.
In Jenin, Israeli troops early yesterday destroyed the homes of four Palestinians.
The soldiers dynamited and bulldozed the house of Alis Afouri, a local leader of the Al-Quds Brigades, the armed branch of Islamic Jihad movement, and the home of Abdel Karim Awes, an official of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group linked to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.
The third house to be razed was that of Mohammed Hassanein, a member of the Al-Quds Brigades and one of the two attackers who used a car bomb to destroy an Israeli bus on Oct. 21 killing 14 Israelis.
Israeli public radio said that the house of Hassanein’s companion, Ashraf Al-Asmar, 17, was also torn down by the army.
More than 50 houses have been razed since August. Human rights organizations have hit out at the policy as "collective punishment."
In another development, a home-made Palestinian rocket landed near the southern Israeli town of Sderot yesterday, the Israeli Army spokesman’s office said.
Meanwhile, Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon said yesterday that Israel accepts the principles of the latest United States peace initiative, but will not agree to a complete freeze in settlement construction in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
An Arab Israeli lawmaker was physically thrown out of Israel’s Parliament yesterday for branding the government as "bloodthirsty". Communist MP Mohammed Barake, denouncing military operations in the Palestinian territories, called Prime Minister Ariel Sharon the "leader of a bloodthirsty government," public radio reported.
