GAZA CITY, 6 January 2004 — Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei said yesterday that Israel’s continued “aggression” in the occupied territories was blowing the chance of his holding a long-awaited meeting with Israeli counterpart Ariel Sharon.

“The raids, the aggression and the incursions continue and I do not think that in such a context the meeting (with Sharon) will bring the results that we hope for,” Qorei told reporters in Gaza City after a Cabinet meeting.

“We are not against the holding of such a meeting but we want it to lead to the alleviation of the suffering of our people and open the political perspectives for a just settlement. We don’t want a meeting simply to pose in front of the cameras,” he added.

Top-level talks between the Israelis and Palestinians have been frozen since August. Both sides have said they are in favor of a first meeting between the two prime ministers since Qorei succeeded Mahmoud Abbas in September, but the summit has been repeatedly pushed back.

Qorei said that Palestinian and Israeli officials who have been trying to lay the groundwork for the summit had not come to an agreement on the agenda. A meeting between senior aides to Sharon and Qorei was called off by the Palestinians last month in protest at a deadly Israeli Army raid in the southern Gaza town of Rafah.

The Israeli Army has also been conducting an operation in the West Bank town of Nablus for more than two weeks and shot dead four Palestinians there over the weekend.

Qorei added he still wanted Palestinian factions to halt their campaign of attacks against Israel but said that Sharon’s government must be prepared to reciprocate. “We are not in favor of a unilateral truce or cease-fire. We are for a reciprocal cease-fire” which should be negotiated between the Israeli and Palestinian governments.

Qorei said he had did not have any information about an upcoming visit by Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who sources have said should arrive in the West Bank town of Ramallah today to continue efforts to persuade hard-line groups such as Hamas to declare a halt to their attacks on Israel.

Meanwhile, one of the chief architects of the unofficial Geneva Initiative Middle East peace plan called on the international community yesterday to press Israel to stop construction of its West Bank separation barrier.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, the driving force on the Palestinian side behind the alternative blueprint which was launched in Switzerland last month, has written to the heads of all diplomatic missions in the Palestinian territories warning that the barrier will “drive the whole region yet again into a new cycle of violence and unrest.”

“We urge you to strongly condemn the construction of the apartheid wall and to exert whatever pressure or influence you have on the Israeli government to stop this systematic process of blowing up every chance for peace,” Abed Rabbo said in his open letter. “We strongly believe that the current Israeli government ... is not only preventing an agreement at present between the two sides but is also trying to create facts on the ground that would make impossible any future peaceful settlement based on a two-state solution.”

The International Court of Justice is to begin hearings into the legal consequences of the barrier at the request of the United Nations General Assembly from Feb. 23. Israeli Justice Minister Tommy Lapid warned Cabinet colleagues on Sunday that Israel could face an international boycott similar to that endured by apartheid-era South Africa if it did not alter the route of the barrier.

In another development, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon faces the sound and fury of his Likud party’s most diehard right-wingers at a convention likely to challenge his policies towards the Palestinians. Sharon has longed sneered at opposition from within Likud’s 3,000-strong central committee, a bastion of support for his strongest party rival, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as signifying nothing. Likud’s rank-and-file elect party leaders.

But with his popularity near an all-time low in opinion polls and a key coalition partner pressing for a softening of the government’s line on the barrier, the last thing Sharon needs is a rough ride within his own party.

The one-day convention will give Likud hard-liners their first nationally televised shot at Sharon’s plan to “disengage” from the Palestinians should talks on implementing a US-backed peace road map fail.