DAMASCUS, 7 July 2005 — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas arrived in Syria yesterday for talks with Syrian President Bashar Assad, on his first visit to Damascus since being elected in January.
He was greeted at the airport by Foreign Minister Farouk Shara and was to meet Bashar today, during a trip expected to reinforce an improvement in ties between Damascus and the Palestinian Authority. He will also meet with the exiled heads of Palestinian factions based in Damascus amid attempts to bring them into a national unity government, said Khaled Fahum, former speaker of the Palestinian Parliament-in-exile.
Speaking to the press about his upcoming talks, Abbas highlighted what he said was the “important and essential role of Damascus in the Middle East peace process and in Israeli-Palestinian peace.” He also pointed out that any peace “would not be complete without Israel returning all occupied Arab territory,” including the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967.
For his part, Shara said Syria would “support the Palestinian cause and a just and durable peace” in the region. Bashar and Abbas last met in December 2004, after the death of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, but before Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority. Farouk Qaddumi, head of the mainstream Fatah group and a man whose relations with Abbas are notoriously bad, met with Shara in Damascus on Monday before also holding talks with the faction leaders in Syria.
Meanwhile, Israel’s defense chief yesterday proposed that the government reroute one of the most controversial parts of a wall it is building through occupied land in the West Bank, officials said in Jerusalem. The changes urged by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz near the large Jewish settlement of Ariel are meant to meet the Supreme Court’s order to minimize hardships to Palestinians and thereby prevent further construction delays due to legal challenges.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon agreed to bring the proposal, which was raised during a special meeting with top security officials, to his Cabinet for debate and approval, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity. They said the revised route would still loop around Ariel and several other settlements deep inside the occupied West Bank but would take in fewer Palestinian villages than originally planned and would also ease restrictions on Palestinian travel.
Israeli settlers unveiled plans yesterday for a mass march on Gaza to protest the pullout from the territory as Abbas eyed a new summit with Sharon before the withdrawal. The march, which has been arranged for July 18, will take place exactly four weeks before the scheduled start of the operation to remove all 8,000 of the settlers from Gaza as well as several hundred residents of four small Jewish enclaves in the northern West Bank.
“This massive show of strength towards Gush Katif should help our heroic brothers,” a statement from the Yesha settlers council said in reference to the main settlement bloc in the south of the occupied territory. “The goal is to reach the settlements ... and to populate them with hundreds of additional families. Even if the army and police try to prevent the demonstrators from advancing, they will steadfastly move ahead on foot until they join up with our besieged brothers in Gush Katif.”
The statement said that convoys would leave from all major towns and cities in Israel and gather in the southern desert town of Netivot and then begin the 15-kilometer march toward the border into Gaza. The government imposed a temporary closure on the Gaza settlements to all non-residents last week as security forces stormed an abandoned hotel which had been taken over by extremist opponents of the pullout plan.
