KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip, 6 June 2003 — Palestinian activists clutching assault rifles and mortar launchers crawled commando-style through fields near a heavily guarded bloc of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip yesterday.
A day after Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas called on militants to halt violence and disarm, gunmen linked to his own Fatah movement trained for attacks that could undermine pledges he made at a US-led summit in Jordan.
Abbas met US President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Wednesday in the Jordanian resort of Aqaba, where the sides agreed to work to advance a US-backed peace “road map”. But activist groups wasted little time in rejecting Abbas’ call to disarm, denouncing the peace plan and vowing to keep up a 32-month-old uprising for independence as long as Israel occupies Palestinian land.
“The road map leads us to hell. It is a plan that is doomed to fail,” a masked spokesman for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades said in Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza. He said Al-Aqsa, Fatah’s armed offshoot, which has carried out bombings and shooting attacks on Israelis, would give Israel a “painful response” in coming days.
As he spoke, members of the Fatah-linked group, some with faces painted and chanting “We are all martyrs-in-waiting”, fanned out in the area for military drills. Some crawled through fields or took cover in bushes while others set up mortar launchers aimed at Israeli positions near the outskirts of the camp.
Sharon has made clear that he will grant no major concessions, such as lifting a military blockade on Palestinian areas or pulling back troops, until Abbas cracks down on militants. The road map requires Abbas to rein in violence. He has preferred negotiations with militant groups to avoid the possibility of sparking civil war, and has predicted a agreement with them in a matter of weeks.
And the armed wing of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) said it would continue military operations against Israeli occupation. “We will continue armed resistance until the occupation and aggression against the Palestinian people come to an end. It is our right and it’s our response to the dangerous resolutions of the Aqaba summit,” The National Resistance Brigades said in a statement in Gaza.
The armed wing of the DFLP is a secular branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The group thus joined other radical factions such Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in defying their prime minister’s attempt to comply with the road map for peace.
A day after the Aqaba summit injected hope into a region torn by 32 months of violence and economic crisis, the Palestinians in general remained cautious, saying they will only believe in the road map if their daily lives started changing. For the residents of Ramallah, which sits at the crossroads of the West Bank and used to be a pulsating business city, there is no better thermometer of political progress than the movement of the military roadblocks that have paralyzed the town since the outbreak of the intifada, or uprising, in September 2000.
“I saw the speeches on television and I could feel that something was happening,” said Amr Mahmud. “So when I went out this morning, I was hoping the road would be open, but nothing had changed,” said the 27-year-old, who earns a living by driving villagers from around Ramallah to the Israeli checkpoints guarding access to the center.
“This is what matters to me, the checkpoints. I don’t feel hope by watching TV, I feel hope when my life starts changing,” he said. Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who was excluded from the Red Sea talks, charged yesterday that Israel had so far “done nothing on the ground”.
Yasser Suleiman, 42, praised Abbas’ “balanced speech” but shared Arafat’s skepticism toward Sharon’s promises. “Israel will do nothing. As you can see I still have to walk for miles everyday because the roads are blocked,” he said, as he walked beneath a scolding sun the nearly three kilometers separating the Surda checkpoint from Ramallah.
Egypt’s opposition Muslim Brotherhood urged the Palestinians to reject calls issued at the peace summits. “The road map and the two summits in Sharm El-Sheikh and Aqaba seek to abort the intifada, to stop the resistance, to achieve security for the Zionist entity and drag the Palestinian people into internal conflicts, even a civil war,” the Brotherhood warned in a statement to AFP in Cairo.
“The Muslim Brotherhood calls for rejecting these Zionist plots and to stick firmly to the resistance so that the Palestinian people can regain their rights,” the statement said.
