OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 13 December 2002 — Former US President Jimmy Carter yesterday offered to mediate talks between Israel and Palestinians as fresh violence claimed the lives of nine people, five of them unarmed Palestinians, in the occupied territories.
Speaking to students at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize said he “would go immediately and with great alacrity,” to the Middle East, but only if the parties concerned and the US government asked him to.
Carter gave no indications he had been asked to do so, however. He helped broker the 1978 Camp David accords that led to peace between Israel and Egypt. The agreement resulted in the Peace Prize for Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Carter said escalating tension between Israelis and Palestinians has not been stemmed and asserted that US President George W. Bush was not impartial about the issue.
“Until President Bush, every president, Democratic or Republican, has in my opinion played a balancing role as a trusted mediator,” he said. “Now though it seems obvious that the present administration in Washington is completely compatible with the Israeli government and they have completely ignored...the Palestinian Authority.”
Seven Palestinians and two Israelis were killed in separate incidents yesterday in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Hebron.
Israeli forces near the Karni border crossing in the Gaza Strip killed five unarmed Palestinians they believed were planning to climb a security fence to get into Israel, an Israeli military source said. Palestinian security sources said the men were laborers trying to sneak into Israel to find work.
Elsewhere in the Gaza Strip, Israeli soldiers shot dead a Palestinian gunman, who the army and a Palestinian group said was on a mission to attack a Jewish settlement.
In a third incident in Gaza, Israeli troops shot and killed a Palestinian who crossed from the seaside strip into Israel and opened fire on soldiers chasing him, the army said.
In Hebron, Palestinian gunmen shot dead two Israeli soldiers, a man and a woman, guarding a rogue settlement near the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the army said. The incident occurred along a route where Palestinians laid an ambush on Nov. 15 that killed 12 Israeli soldiers and security men from the nearby Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba. Settlers have set up a caravan settlement near the scene of last month’s attack. The gunmen opened fire yesterday about 60 meters from the site, which also houses the Ibrahimi Mosque where a Jewish settler massacred 29 worshipers in 1994. Israeli armored personnel carriers and jeeps rolled into the center of Hebron, sending up flares, as soldiers ordered Palestinian men out of their homes in a search for the gunmen, witnesses said.
Some 450 Jewish settlers live in heavily protected enclaves in Hebron among 130,000 Palestinians.
In Jerusalem, US Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith held talks on preparations for possible war against Iraq with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and later met Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz in Tel Aviv.
