CAIRO, 5 December 2003 — Palestinian factions kicked off a fresh round of talks in Cairo yesterday to agree on a suspension of anti-Israeli attacks as Israel said it could curb its military crackdown if a truce was reached.
Participants said the representatives of the 12 factions met with Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who last June brokered a Palestinian truce that collapsed seven weeks later. President leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and the hardliners of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
However, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades — a largely autonomous radical Fatah offshoot — has imposed such stringent conditions on a truce that it could effectively scupper a deal at any moment.
Senior Hamas official Mohammad Nazzal, taking part in truce talks, said: “It is illogical to ask the Palestinians to accept a unilateral truce such as the last one in June while the occupation is stepping up its aggression on our people.
“Our position in Hamas is that we will halt attacking (Israeli) civilians and keep them out of the conflict if Israel does the same. As for the so-called cease-fire (in the West Bank and Gaza), we will determine our position based on Israel’s decision. Israel has to decide first,” Nazzal said.
Suleiman is expected to fly to Washington next week to urge US officials to send monitors to supervise any cease-fire in the occupied areas. A senior Fatah member said that during informal talks 90 percent of groups belonging to the Palestine Liberation Organization welcomed a conditional cease-fire.
The Israeli government, which never recognized the truce reached by former Palestinian Premier Mahmoud Abbas last June, said yesterday that it could curb its operations in the occupied territories to give his successor Ahmad Qorei a chance.
“I imagine we will be able to reduce the intensity of our military activity if the Palestinians manage to reach a truce, provided there are no attacks being prepared which we would have to foil,” Deputy Defense Minister Zeev Boim told public radio. “We have to give Abu Alaa (Qorei) a chance,” Boim added.
But the talks started against the tense backdrop of a foiled suicide attack by Islamic Jihad. Israeli military sources announced Wednesday night that troops in the West Bank had nabbed two Jihad militants, including one who was strapped with an explosives belt. The army said he was on his way to carry out a suicide attack on a school in Israel.
The bombing would have been the first Palestinian attack against a school and would have shattered a lull in Palestinian suicide bombings, exactly two months after 21 people plus the bomber were killed in an attack in Haifa.
“Had the attack we foiled yesterday taken place, it is obvious that Arafat would no longer be in the region, in the Middle East,” Israel’s hawkish Interior Security Minister Tzachi Hanegbi told public radio.
Interviewed by AFP in his Ramallah headquarters where he began a third year of confinement to the hands of the Israeli Army, Arafat said the Palestinian side was ready to implement a truce. “We are ready, but we hope that the other side will be ready also,” he said.
Palestinian groups are likely to set a number of conditions for a truce, such as the release of more prisoners, a halt to the construction of the West Bank separation barrier, an end to settlement activity and some army withdrawals.
Boim admitted that the pace of the West Bank settlement outpost evacuations required by the internationally-backed road map blueprint had slowed down in recent months.
“This slowing down was explained by the fact that the Palestinian Authority has not acted on its commitment to fight against terrorism, which made the evacuations more difficult,” he said.
As both sides continued to blame each other for the stalled peace process, US Secretary of State Colin Powell was preparing to receive the backers of an unofficial peace plan, the so-called Geneva initiative. Israel’s Yossi Beilin and Palestinian official Yasser Abed Rabbo, the main architects of the alternative peace plan launched Monday in Geneva, were in Washington to promote their plan, which deals with all key issues in the decades-old conflict.
Nazzal said Hamas would demand that other Palestinian groups condemn an unofficial Israeli-Palestinian peace plan signed in Geneva this week that spells out steps to end the decades-old conflict.
