RAMALLAH, West Bank, 24 February — Palestinian President Yasser Arafat yesterday rejected Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to create buffer zones between Israel and Palestinian territories.
“This so-called separation plan is a violation of the agreements,” Arafat told Reuters in an interview in his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
“It creates cantons in our Palestinian areas, and the Oslo (1993 interim peace) agreement prevents cantons Sharon is trying to create. He has no right to do this. It’s in violation of international law.”
Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has welcomed a Saudi peace overture for Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for the Jewish state’s full withdrawal from occupied land, the SPA news agency said yesterday.
The initiative contained “some positive and bold ideas on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process at a serious time when violence has reached an unprecedented level,” SPA quoted Annan as telling Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, in a telephone call. Annan said he hoped the move would “motivate parties to restore peace and re-establish justice” in the Middle East.
Prince Abdullah was quoted in the New York Times Sunday as saying Saudi Arabia favored Arab states normalizing ties with Israel if it carried out a full withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.
In Hebron, a Palestinian man was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers near the West Bank town of Hebron early yesterday, Palestinian security sources said.
Firas Al-Bau, 22, was killed after he and a friend approached an Israeli outpost.
In the southern Gaza Strip, a Palestinian boy was seriously wounded by Israeli gunfire when troops moved toward a Palestinian refugee camp, medical sources said. Security sources said one tank and a bulldozer moved 10 meters into Palestinian self-rule areas of Rafah, firing heavy machine guns.
In separate incidents, 18 Palestinians were wounded, four of them seriously, after the Israeli incursion sparked clashes with young stone-throwers, a hospital director said. A Palestinian man died in Bethlehem hospital yesterday from wounds he received when an Israeli tank shelled the West Bank town last October, medical sources said.
In Tel Aviv, a senior Israeli official said yesterday that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat must arrest one more militant connected to the assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi before his house arrest in the West Bank town of Ramallah can be lifted.
In another development, Israel has undertaken to halt its assassinations of Palestinians and bombing of Palestinian targets for several days, a Palestinian security official told DPA yesterday.
