RAMALLAH, West Bank, 28 May — The Palestinian Authority Cabinet ministers moved yesterday to scotch speculation that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s reform program was a hollow pledge, promising swift change in the government and elections by the end of the year.
Cabinet Secretary Ahmed Abdel Rahman told reporters that Arafat had vowed to put a new government into place within 10 days and denied reports he was backing down from other reforms. Arafat earlier this month pledged to reform the PA.
The Palestinian Legislative Council, or parliament, also adopted a proposal for municipal polls to be held before the end of 2002 and general elections at the beginning of 2003. “The mechanism for reforms is in its final step, and we are putting on the finishing touches,” Abdel Rahman said.
Top Arafat aide Nabil Abu Rudeina said an exact date for presidential and general elections would be announced within days. The Palestinian Authority leadership recommended Monday that elections be held in December, but Arafat retains the final say on that issue. “The elections for the Legislative Council and the presidency can take place in December 2002,” the leadership said in a statement after a Ramallah meeting chaired by Arafat.
The daily Al-Ayyam newspaper said the PA leadership had decided on the Cabinet changes to streamline the government as well as make its ministries more efficient and frugal. Twenty ministerial portfolios were deemed “an appropriate number” during the meeting, the paper said. There are currently 29 ministers with portfolios and three without. Arafat is both chairman and interior minister.
Arafat called yesterday for a return to Middle East peace talks as Israeli troops raided more West Bank cities after a bomber killed two at a cafe in Israel. “The Tenet understandings and the George Mitchell report should be implemented and we should come back to the negotiations with a sponsorship of the international community and the participation of the Arab sides,” Arafat told reporters at his battle-scarred headquarters in Ramallah.
He was referring to a plan to revive Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation produced by CIA Director George Tenet last June and a truce-to-talks scheme devised by a commission led by former US Sen. George Mitchell.
Meanwhile, Israeli plainclothes police detained the Palestinian governor of Jerusalem yesterday, saying he was in the city illegally. Jamal Othman Nasser, appointed to the post by Arafat, was taken into custody while meeting another Palestinian official in Arab East Jerusalem, the governor’s lawyer said. Interim Israeli-Palestinian peace deals grant no standing in the city to Palestinian Authority — or the governor he appointed for Jerusalem.
Nasser’s lawyer, Jawad Boulos, said police took his client into custody on ground he lacked an Israeli permit to enter Jerusalem.
Nasser lives in the West Bank village of Abu Dis, outside the municipal borders that Israel set after capturing Arab East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War. Abu Dis is inside Jordan’s pre-1967 borders for Jerusalem.
The Israeli Army raided Jenin town as part of its brutal operations of West Bank incursions to track down activists. An army spokesman said 11 Palestinians wanted for “terrorist activities” had been arrested in Jenin. Israeli troops backed by helicopter gunships pushed into Jenin. A Palestinian man was killed when shooting erupted in the town center.
The army said it had captured Rami Awad, a leader of the Islamic movement Hamas, a day after seizing the local leader of another movement — the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades — during a raid in Bethlehem. Palestinian officials confirmed Awad’s detention.
The Palestinians have accused the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of using the heavy-handed tactics to erode Palestinian autonomy and wipe out the 1993 Oslo peace accords which he so opposed.
Meeting in Amman, the kings of Jordan, Abdallah, and Morocco, Muhammad VI, criticized the Israeli raids, saying such action undermines efforts to secure peace in the region.
In another development, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak telephoned Arafat last evening to discuss the “latest developments in the Palestinian territories,” the official MENA news agency reported in Cairo. The conversation also dealt with “the contacts under way on the Arab and international levels” about the Middle East, said MENA.
Mubarak’s call came as the US State Department’s top Middle East diplomat, William Burns, is due to begin his trip to the region in Egypt today. US congressman Darrell Issa, who met Mubarak in Cairo yesterday, said an international conference for peace in the Middle East could be held as early as July.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration is debating whether to depart from its policy and set a timetable for negotiating a Middle East peace settlement, US officials said in Rome yesterday. As President George W. Bush condemned a Palestinian bombing in Israel, senior aides sought a way to set Israelis and Palestinians on the road to peace.
Setting a negotiating timetable for Israel and the Palestinian Authority would be a shift in policy for Bush who has said in the past that this was up to the sides to the conflict. “We are not at this point prepared to table an American plan with specific deadlines,” US Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters in Rome.
