OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 4 August — Pressure mounted on Israel yesterday to accept international observers and stop targeted killings, but Tel Aviv said it was against the deployment of international observers and reiterated warning it would hit back hard if Israeli targets were attacked.
The US yesterday renewed its opposition to Israel’s targeted killings of suspected Palestinians, as it labored to downplay Vice President Dick Cheney’s comment a day earlier that there may be “some justification” for the policy.
In Berlin, Germany’s Deputy Foreign Minister Ludger Volmer added his voice to the international chorus condemning the policy, calling it “unacceptable”. “Every country has a right to defend itself, but the means it uses must remain proportional and international law must be respected,” Volmer told Inforadio Berlin-Brandenburg.
The European Union also pressed Israel to drop its insistence on a total halt to Palestinian violence before the two sides begin steps to resume peace talks, EU officials said yesterday.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana sought to convince the Israelis and the United States in intensive telephone diplomacy this week that a threadbare cease-fire could otherwise collapse, raising the danger of a wider Middle East conflict.
Another EU diplomat said Sharon’s stance suggested he meant to delay or evade implementing the Mitchell report’s other recommendations, notably a complete freeze on Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
“It’s crazy when the Israelis claim that their assassinations don’t violate the cease-fire but the Palestinian street violence they provoke does,” the EU diplomat said.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper said the United States and its European allies were drawing up plans to send an observer force to the West Bank and Gaza Strip that would have Israel’s reluctant approval.
Citing Western diplomatic sources, the newspaper said Washington had drawn up a series of options on the size, mandate and the exact mission of the force and where it would be located. The Guardian report, quoting “Western diplomatic sources”, said the US was secretly drawing up detailed plans for the deployment of an international force which would probably not be exclusively made up of the CIA and was almost certain to include Britain.
Meanwhile, in fresh violence in Gaza City Israeli troops injured 14 Palestinians. Nine Palestinian youths were injured, one of them seriously, when Israeli troops opened fire with live bullets on a small crowd throwing stones at them near the Karni crossing point in the Gaza Strip. Others were injured by Isreali troops elsewhere. In the West Bank, Palestinian officials said an Israel tank had also blown up a Palestinian car on a bypass used by Jewish settlers and the army near Nablus.
In another development, the Jerusalem municipal council yesterday ordered the homes of seven Palestinian families to be demolished, saying they had been built illegally.
The Guardian yesterday quoted two Israeli government sources as saying that the Jewish state was coming closer to accepting some form of observer force.
In Jerusalem, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said security forces foiled a Palestinian bombing attempt at Tel Aviv’s main bus station yesterday that could have caused dozens of deaths.
Israel announced yesterday the arrest of a Palestinian suicide bomber for the first time since Al-Quds intifada broke out last September.
