WASHINGTON, 21 June — The White House said yesterday US Secretary of State Colin Powell will visit the Middle East next week to try to help preserve a fragile cease-fire. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said President George W. Bush spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat yesterday.
“The president has asked the secretary to go to the Middle East to help to secure efforts to preserve the cease-fire and build upon it,” Fleischer told reporters at his daily briefing.
In the occupied territories, a Palestinian and an Israeli were shot dead as the brittle week-old Middle East cease-fire edged closer to collapse despite pledges from both sides to try to end the bloodshed.
The Israelis and Palestinians bitterly accused each other of failing to stick to the US-brokered truce as Sharon came under mounting pressure from Israeli hard-liners to ditch the accord and resume military strikes. Sharon’s Security Cabinet announced after a three-hour meeting that Israel would abide by the agreement, but Arafat angrily denounced the Israelis as liars and said they had not stopped their “aggression.”
“The Israeli cease-fire is a lie. They (the Israelis) did not stop their aggression,” Arafat told reporters in the West Bank town of Ramallah on his return from a trip abroad that has taken him to Egypt, Jordan and Spain.
“Their cease-fire is only an attempt to deceive world public opinion. They are still firing from tanks and internationally banned weapons, and the settlers are committing crimes under army protection,” he added. Palestinian Jamal Nafaa, 30, was killed near a military checkpoint outside the West Bank town of Ramallah after Israeli troops opened fire on him because of what army radio said was his “suspicious” behavior. The shooting took place not far from the Kiryat Sefer settlement just a few kilometers from the border with Israel, army radio said, adding that Israeli troops later tried to save the man’s life.
At around the same time a Jewish settler was gunned down near another West Bank settlement, Homesh, where two settlers were slain in separate attacks earlier in the week. Settler sources said the man died shortly after the shooting but could not immediately confirm his name.
The killings put the death toll at six Palestinians and four Israelis since the truce, negotiated by US intelligence chief George Tenet, came into effect last Wednesday in hopes of ending nearly nine months of violence.
Sharon had not been expected to renounce the Tenet accord ahead of his talks in Washington next week with Bush, but the Security Cabinet warned in a statement that Israel reserved the right to strike back against Palestinian attacks.
Arafat’s top aide Nabil Abu Rudeina said the Palestinians wanted the Bush administration in Washington to pressure the Israelis.
Meanwhile, a survivor of the massacre at the Shatilla Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon in 1982, Suad Srur El-Marai, who is currently in Brussels seeking to press charges against Sharon, said she had received death and kidnap threats. The threats came directly from someone involved in the massacre, according to a source.
