OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 27 February — Israel again closed off several Palestinian towns yesterday where a months-old clampdown had been partially lifted, as the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon prepared to tell the White House he would not stand any more violence.
The army blockades, which kept hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from entering or leaving their West Bank towns, came after a day of gunbattles in the flash point city of Hebron that left 15 people wounded.
An army spokesman in Jerusalem said there was no timetable for lifting the new clampdown around Hebron or the curfew on Palestinians in Jewish areas. Residents said the blockade had also been reinstated around the major West Bank towns of Nablus and Jenin.
The truce was meant to solidify the first phase of the Mitchell report, which calls for a total cease-fire followed by a cooling-off period and then steps to rebuild trust between the two sides, such as a halt to further settlement building.
In Washington, Sharon yesterday defiantly rejected beginning a cooling-off period even as President George W. Bush insisted progress was being made toward peace inch by inch. Sitting side by side in the Oval Office, Bush and Sharon appeared to openly disagree on how to advance the peace plan by former US Sen. George Mitchell that is the subject of urgent consultations.
Sharon called for a “full cessation of hostilities, of terror and incitement” before moving to the next step, a cooling-off period. “Israel will not negotiate under fire,” Sharon said. “If it will do that, it will never reach peace. Therefore we have to be very strict in order to reach peace.”
Bush, however, did not mention a full halt to the violence, instead insisting that the “cycle of violence must be broken” before starting a cooling-off period and that he wanted to talk to Sharon about “what is realistic.”
In Paris, Syrian President Bashar Assad warned French lawmakers yesterday that the Middle East was slipping into war after the failure of a peace process begun ten years ago at a Madrid conference. “The region is moving toward war, although this is in the interest of no one,” Assad told the French National Assembly’s foreign affairs committee.
In Bamako, the foreign ministers of the Organization of Islamic Conference yesterday continued their deliberations on the situation in the Middle East.
Addressing the conference on the second day, Dr. Nizar Madani, Saudi Arabia’s assistant foreign minister, urged the OIC member countries to extend full-scale support for the Palestinians reeling under Israeli aggression. Delivering the Kingdom’s address, Madani called upon Islamic countries to demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinians through action instead of statements and conferences.
