OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 25 May 2003 — Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s acceptance of a US-backed road map to peace and a Palestinian state drew opposition yesterday from within his own right-wing Likud party ahead of a Cabinet vote.
In a violent backdrop to new hopes of ending 32 months of bloodshed, Israeli forces raided a West Bank refugee camp and shot dead two Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
One of the Palestinians killed was an unarmed, mentally handicapped person. Palestinian medical sources said Hamdi Abu Khussa, 20, was mentally handicapped and that he was hit by machine-gun fire as he approached the Israeli border.
After weeks of hesitation, Sharon’s office announced Friday his acceptance of the road map after Washington said it would address Israel’s reservations about the plan as it was being implemented.
Gideon Saar, the Likud chief whip, urged party ministers to oppose the proposal, which sets out reciprocal steps leading to a Palestinian state by 2005 and a freeze on Jewish settlement expansion on land Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East War.
Ahead of a possible vote on the road map at the weekly Cabinet meeting today, Saar told Israel Radio the plan was “the most dangerous document” in the history of Middle East peacemaking.
But political sources said Sharon would push the road map through his 23-member Cabinet, where only about four of the Likud’s 14 ministers seemed likely to line up with members of two far-right parties in opposing the plan. The five ministers of Sharon’s other coalition partner, the centrist Shinui party, support the proposal.
The Palestinians have accepted the plan, which also calls for fighters to be disarmed and detained by the Palestinian Authority.
In Tulkarm refugee camp in the West Bank, witnesses said soldiers searched house-to-house for fighters, detaining four Palestinian suspects and two US members of the non-violent, pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM).
