CAIRO, 6 December 2003 — Several radical Palestinian factions yesterday rejected an Egyptian proposal for a yearlong halt to attacks on Israelis amid efforts to secure a cease-fire and restart peace talks, a participant said.
“Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine are opposed to a yearlong truce because they believe that Israel is offering nothing in return and is not intending to,” the delegate said.
The Hamas resistance movement will tell Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei it will consider a cease-fire only after Israel halts attacks first, officials from the militant group spearheading attacks against Israel said yesterday.
Senior Hamas official Muhammad Nazzal said he and representatives of Damascus-based militants Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and the Sa’eqa meeting in Cairo, share similar views and may declare their intentions tomorrow at the close of talks.
“We will welcome him (Qorei) and inform him of our position. We will tell him we don’t believe that at this stage a total cessation of military attacks is a suitable step. Israel has to accept a cease-fire first,” Nazzal said. “But we have said we were ready for a mutual, conditional, halt to attacks against civilians,” he told Reuters. Qorei will arrive in Cairo today.
Leading Hamas official Musa Abu Marzuk told Palestinian faction leaders yesterday that his group was leaving the door ajar for an agreement over a conditional cease-fire.
“Abu Markuk told the delegates Hamas respected a truce in June but the occupation didn’t, and based on the previous experience, it rejects, in principle, a truce or conditional cease-fire this time,” a source close to Hamas at the talks said. “But he told them Hamas was ready to keep the door open to reconsider its position if Israel announced a cease-fire agreement first,” he said.
In the meantime, thousands of Palestinians staged protests against the unofficial Geneva Initiative peace plan, setting light to a Swiss flag as well as effigies of the project’s chief architects who were set to meet US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Some 3,000 protesters gathered in the West Bank town of Nablus as part of a rally organized by the Hamas.
Effigies of the chief Palestinian negotiator of the initiative Yasser Abed Rabbo and his Israeli counterpart Yossi Beilin were set on fire as well as the red and white national emblem of Switzerland. The American Stars and Stripes flag was also torched.
