OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 9 January 2004 — Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was under pressure yesterday from his powerful finance minister and the UN’s Mideast envoy to open talks with Syria, as two more Palestinians were shot dead in the occupied territories.
Palestinian security and medical sources said an Israeli undercover unit killed a militant from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a radical offshoot of the mainstream Fatah movement, in the northern West Bank town of Jenin. Asaad Salah Khaliliyeh, 32, was shot in front of the Jenin municipality by plainclothes Israeli security forces traveling in a civilian vehicle, the sources said.
Israeli troops also killed a 46-year-old civilian before dawn by opening fire on Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip from watchtowers guarding the border with Egypt, Palestinian security sources and witnesses said. The latest deaths brought the overall toll from the 40-month-old intifada to 3,694 people killed, including 2,768 Palestinians and 860 Israelis, according to an AFP count.
A new report by the Israel’s Shin Beth internal security services released yesterday showed that the number of Israelis killed in Palestinian attacks last year more than halved, compared to 2002. A total of 213 people were killed in 2003, including 50 soldiers and policemen, in attacks on “Israeli targets”, compared with 451 in 2002, the report said.
But the relative downturn in violence has failed to translate into movement in the peace process, with top-level contacts between the Israelis and Palestinians frozen for nearly five months. With the internationally-drafted peace road map in tatters, Netanyahu urged Sharon to go back on his refusal to resume negotiations with Syria.
Netanyahu received backing yesterday from Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, who said Israel should not give the cold shoulder to Bashar’s offer.
“There is a need to examine Syria’s intentions seriously, but this is a long way from saying in advance that we are ready for this or that withdrawal. We have to go (to the negotiations) without preconditions. I believe that in this way we can achieve peace,” Shalom said.
The United Nations’ coordinator for the Middle East, Terje Roed-Larsen, also urged Israel to accept Syria’s offer to reopen peace talks, saying it was in the country’s best interests. “It is in the interest of the Israeli government to return directly to the negotiating table,” Roed-Larsen told the London-based Arab newspaper Al-Hayat in an interview published yesterday.
An Israeli newspaper reported yesterday Sharon will not bring his plan to dismantle some settlements and impose a boundary on Palestinians before the hawkish central committee of his Likud Party. Sharon has said previously that he would pursue his “disengagement plan” if peace talks do not bear fruit in the coming months.
However, many Likud officials consider the dismantling any of the roughly 150 Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and withdrawal from any land there as anathema to their dream of a Greater Israel. Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Mideast war.
Sharon has largely ignored party officials, and the Ma’ariv daily yesterday quoted him as saying he will not bring his new plan to the central committee for approval. In talks with his aides, Sharon said that “when it will be relevant, I will bring the proposals to the Cabinet for approval,” the newspaper reported.
