AMMAN/GAZA, 19 June — Arab leaders yesterday warned that a shaky cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinians could collapse unless international observers were sent to monitor the truce, effectively backing a similar call by Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
“Maintaining the cease-fire that was recently announced needs ... the creation of an international observer force on the ground,” an Arab League ministerial committee said in a statement at the end of a meeting in Amman. Such a force is essential “to monitor the truce and Israeli engagements as well as to protect the Palestinian people,” the statement said, renewing full Arab support for the Palestinians in their uprising against Israeli rule.
It urged Israel to remove “immediately” the crippling blockade imposed on Palestinian territories and withdraw its troops from Palestinian land occupied since the start of the intifada on Sept. 28.
Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said the six-day-old, US-brokered “fragile cease-fire will not take roots unless there is a lifting of the blockade and an end to (Jewish) settlements.”
“A cease-fire cannot hold when people are hungry, when they wake up in the morning and see (Israeli) tanks and are told they should not react,” Moussa told reporters at the end of the meeting. The ministerial committee’s statement “is a clear message that says that as long as there is occupation there will be resistance, and as long as the occupation increased ... the resistance will increase,” he said.
Meanwhile, political and labor union leaders in Jordan yesterday welcomed Saturday’s statement by Prince Sultan, second deputy premier and minister of defense and aviation, urging Arab countries to boycott the companies that deal with Israel if the peace initiatives fail. They said the Arab boycott of Israel was essential to force the Jewish state withdraw from the occupied territories.
Arafat addressed the meeting in the morning and exhorted the international community to swiftly send “observers” to monitor the truce, describing the situation as “very dangerous”. The hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and “his herds of settlers” should evacuate all occupied Palestinian territory “if they want peace and security”, Arafat said. Putting the Palestinian casualty toll over the past nine months at “more than 700 martyrs and more than 29,000 injured”, Arafat said the Israeli blockade was sapping all resources.
Also yesterday, Palestinians protested “the reoccupation” by the Israeli Army of an area under full Palestinian control near Deir El-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, a senior Palestinian security official told AFP. According to the head of the Israeli-Palestinian liaison committee, Col. Khaled Abu Ula, the Israeli Army reoccupied an area near Wed Silka, south of Deir El-Balah in violation of the cease-fire.
Israeli bulldozers removed cement roadblocks at the West Bank towns of Halhoul and Qalqila yesterday. But dozens of checkpoints and cement roadblocks were still in place at other entrances to the two towns. Palestinian Cabinet minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said Israeli moves on the ground were propaganda ploys.
“All that Israel says about relaxing the siege is just theater. This theater is carried out for one hour or two before television cameras and after that everything returns to what it was,” Abed Rabbo said.
