OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 7 August 2003 — Some 339 Palestinian prisoners may have been taken by bus to checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza Wednesday, but it still looks like there is no movement in the international peace plan known as the “road map”.

The release of the prisoners was due to be an Israeli goodwill gesture to Palestinian Premier Mahmoud Abbas. Instead, it achieved almost the opposite.

It sparked a bitter row as Palestinians accused Israel of trickery and deception and expressed angry dissatisfaction with the number of prisoners released.

Two months after the road map was formally launched at a United States-led summit in Jordan and with less than two months to go until the hudna (cease-fire) declared by Palestinian militant groups ends, nothing seems to be moving between Israel and the Palestinians.

Israel says it is not willing to take further steps until the Palestinians do and the Palestinians say they cannot take further steps until Israel does more. Israel continues accusing the Palestinians of being too weak and compliant to the militant Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups as well as renegade gunmen belonging to Abbas’ own Fatah party. Reports last weekend said that under a deal brokered by the US, Israel was willing to hand over Ramallah to the Palestinians and allow Yassir Arafat to move freely in the central West Bank city, if the Palestinian president transferred to a Palestinian jail Jericho 17 hardcore militants who have been holed up in his headquarters for more than a year. But although Arafat announced he would do so, or else send them to Gaza, he backed down and the militants have remained in the headquarters.

Israel feels uncomfortable that the quiet achieved since Hamas and the Islamic Jihad declared their unilateral cease-fire, depends entirely on the whim of the militant groups to adhere to — and extend — their truce, rather than on the Palestinian Authority (PA).

And after a shooting attack near Jerusalem Sunday night in which four Israelis were injured, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Israel would not withdraw from more reoccupied autonomous West Bank cities until the PA imposed the cease-fire on all factions. Mofaz and Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon said Israel would not continue with the road map process until the PA “dismantled the terror infrastructure”. But Abbas and his security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, have said they cannot and will not confront the militant groups so long as the hudna is in place. Any attempts to disarm them would mean “civil war”, they argue.

Fending off accusations by right-wing legislators that by releasing prisoners he was giving the Palestinians too much while getting nothing in return, Sharon for his part told a parliamentary committee Monday that “it’s possible to say that we haven’t given anything”.

For that reason and in particular because of his disappointment at the prisoners’ release, Abbas cancelled a meeting with Sharon scheduled for Wednesday.

The Palestinians are also disgruntled about continued Israeli construction within Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Sharon says Israel removed 22 settlement outposts since he first took office in March 2001 and is about to dismantle 12 more.

But the Israeli Peace Now movement says that while eight outposts were removed since the road map was launched, eight new ones have been set up, meaning a zero-sum result.

Nevertheless, the road map has achieved what previous plans failed to do during the last three years of mutual confrontations - almost absolute calm.

Careful signs of some economic recovery are beginning to show on both sides. A large, modern shopping mall opened in Ramallah and although most shops inside have yet to open, an up-scale supermarket on the first floor is already operating.

And a front-page headline in the Israeli Ma’ariv daily announced that for the first time in months, new jobs are opening up in Israel’s high-tech industry.

Anything might happen with the fragile hudna, analyst Ben Caspit pointed out in the Israeli Ma’ariv daily Wednesday, “but in the meantime the quiet ... has come to us all just when we need it and nobody is thinking about the day after tomorrow”.