OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 6 July — The hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says he has worked out a secret peace plan with the Bush administration to end the Middle East conflict, a report said yesterday. "The general feeling that there exists no plan has helped keep this plan secret," the Yedioth Aharonot newspaper quoted the hard-line Israeli leader as telling an economic conference here Thursday.
"I was therefore able quietly to work for months to reach an understanding with the Americans," Sharon said, without providing any details about the plan or which US officials he had spoken with. "We’re interested in putting back on track the peace process, not to create the illusion of a peace process but to reach a real agreement which will bring peace," Sharon said.
"I decided to take the initiative and change the negative atmosphere in the region and to give a chance for peace," he said. He added that "Israel warmly welcomes the principles raised in President Bush’s speech" on the Middle East, referring to a key Middle East policy address given by George W. Bush late last month.
Israeli media, however, reported that Sharon has formulated a peace plan which calls for a "provisional" Palestinian state on 49 percent of the West Bank and parts of the Gaza Strip. Under the plan, the provisional state would include seven percent more land in addition to the 42 percent of the West Bank over which the PA has formal autonomy. But the provisional state could only take effect after Palestinian violence against Israel stopped, the PA democratized and its leadership replaced. It would exist for ten to 15 years. Only after that Israel would be prepared to accept a permanent peace treaty.
However, a senior aide to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat dismissed Sharon’s "imaginary" peace plan, and said the former general was likely just floating a "trial balloon." "These imaginary peace plans and trial balloons will lead to nothing," Nabil Abu Rudeina told reporters yesterday.
In another development, Israeli Army Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz said yesterday that Israel is likely to stay "for months" in the Palestinian autonomous areas it has reoccupied. As Israeli troops operating in the West Bank pressed on with conducting arrests and imposing an on-and-off curfew, Zuhair Manasra, the newly appointed chief of the Palestinian preventive security in the West Bank, said he saw the reigning in of Palestinian activists under the current circumstances as "nearly impossible".
Continuing their own crackdown on activists of different organizations, Israeli troops arrested at least 19 Palestinians yesterday, five of them in Hebron and another five in Nablus, Israel Radio reported. Six military jeeps, backed by an Apache helicopter, also entered Jericho and arrested three people, Jericho Gov. Abu Baker Sabet said. Mofaz denied the offensive was a formal reoccupation of the 42 percent of the West Bank over which the Palestinian Authority gained autonomy following the 1993 interim Oslo peace accords. But when asked how long he expected the army to stay in the reoccupied cities, he said: "in my opinion, we are talking in terms of months."
Hundreds of Palestinians gathered in Gaza City yesterday morning for the funeral of two activists of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades killed in an explosion by Israel. Dozens of armed members of Al-Aqsa, armed wing in Arafat’s ruling Fatah party which has claimed responsibility for scores of shootings and bombings in Israel and the Palestinian areas, marched in the procession, firing their guns in the air.
The two, senior Al-Aqsa member Col. Jihad El-Omarin, 45, and his assistant Wael Al-Namara, were killed when a powerful bomb exploded in the white Mercedes they were driving on Thursday night.
