OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 13 May 2003 — Israel reimposed a travel ban on the Gaza Strip yesterday despite a pledge to make humanitarian gestures toward the Palestinians as part of a new US peace plan.
After talks with US Secretary of State Colin Powell in Jerusalem on Sunday, the Israeli government agreed to free 180 Palestinian detainees and allow 25,000 Palestinian workers to enter Israel, security sources said. The moves were apparently in response to Powell’s request that Israel and the Palestinians start practical, conciliatory steps even before Israel endorses the road map peace plan, which aims for an independent Palestinian state in 2005.
In Cairo, Powell said Israel had in effect started work on the peace plan with a package of humanitarian gestures toward the Palestinians.
But shortly after the Israeli measures were announced, the army reinstated a ban on Palestinian travel in and out of the Gaza Strip, citing security concerns. “I think we are very serious in our intentions to advance toward peace...which include making gestures to the Palestinian side,” Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said.
“But we have always said that any gestures to ease the lives of Palestinians will be carried out only if they don’t harm the security of our citizens,” he told Israel Radio.
Israel and the Palestinians have been locked in daily violence since the start in September 2000 of an uprising for independence. Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat warned that Israel’s unwillingness to accept the road map “indicates a road to military escalation and further deterioration on the ground”.
Israel’s position on the peace plan may be clarified only when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sees US President George W. Bush in Washington on May 20.
Sharon will meet his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas on Friday for the first time since Abbas took office, a senior Palestinian official said yesterday.
In Washington, US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said President George W. Bush was determined to press Israel and the Palestinians to “do what they can do for peace”.
Rice said the road map, for months the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s Middle East policy, was “simply a way to carry out the president’s June 24 vision”. “We don’t want to spend time negotiating the road map.”
She said Powell had made good progress in promoting the peace plan.
Early yesterday, Israeli troops killed two Palestinians in Gaza when they tried to lay a land mine in the path of advancing tanks, the army and witnesses said.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said Israeli gestures “would have been good indication, had they not been accompanied by actions on the ground that certainly go contrary to a desire to solve the problem”.
Powell is on a Middle East tour to drum up support for the road map, which Palestinians and Arabs see as the best hope for progress since the start of the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation in 2000.
