OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 4 February 2003 — Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon failed in talks with Labour Party chief Amram Mitzna yesterday to persuade him to join a broad ruling coalition with violence against Palestinians persisting and a war on Iraq looming.
Mitzna said there was no reason for center-left Labour to recreate a bloc with the right-wing Likud which collapsed in October, because Sharon continued to rule out scrapping Jewish settlements on land where Palestinians are fighting occupation.
“I expected greater moderation, a gesture in our direction, but heard views that do not enable dialogue,” Mitzna, who wants Israel to evacuate the Gaza Strip and resume negotiations with Palestinians on a final peace deal, told Israel radio.
He said retaining settlements underscored the Israeli right’s insensitivity to worsening poverty from a recession in Israel that he said could be alleviated if funds now devoted to expanding and securing settlements were reallocated.
“Settlements in Gaza have no security, social or economic value and (holding on to them) shows unwillingness to appreciate the great economic and social distress in Israel which requires us to change our priorities,” Mitzna said.
Sharon, who won re-election last week, champions settlements on lands Israel took in the 1967 Middle East war and refuses to reopen peace talks until the violence, in which at least 1,811 Palestinians have been killed, is quelled.
“The prime minister told Mitzna a unity government, as broad a government as possible, was vital to the people of Israel,” said a statement issued by Sharon’s office.
Mitzna repeated that Labour would head the opposition in Parliament after the Jan. 28 election. It was Sharon’s first meeting with Mitzna since Labour’s worst election drubbing ever.
Meanwhile, an Israeli military court yesterday sentenced to 27 years in prison a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip who it found was trained by Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda group to set up sleeper cells for attacks on Israelis. Prosecutors charged that Nabil Okal, 29, a member of the Hamas group, had learned bomb making at an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 1998. The trial was the first conducted by Israeli authorities against a Palestinian with alleged links to Al-Qaeda.
“Okal was trained by Al-Qaeda and dispatched to set up sleeper cells in the territories,” a senior Israeli military officer told Reuters. Israeli authorities did not disclose if his alleged recruitment efforts, conducted among Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, were successful. Nor did they say whether Okal or anyone affiliated with him had carried out anti-Israeli attacks before his arrest in June 2000, prior to the start three months later of a Palestinian uprising for statehood. “I’m innocent!” Okal told reporters outside the military court after it handed down the 27-year sentence at a hearing at Erez crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
Israel usually tries those accused of threatening national security in military courts, which lack some of the due process customary in civil cases. Some defendants in Israeli military courts have complained of poorly qualified counsel and lack of access to evidence against them.
In another development, two Palestinian farmers were killed by Israeli tank fire in the southern Gaza Strip yesterday as they were working in their fields, Palestinian security and medical officials said. Heavy machine gun fire from the tank killed Salem Qdeha, 60, and Zuheir Abu Shaab, 35, as well as wounding another man and a woman, the sources said. (The Independent)
