GAZA CITY, 25 January 2004 — Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in Gaza City yesterday as a US diplomatic team prepared for a trip to the region to try to repair the tattered Middle East peace “road map.”
But Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat expressed fear that time was running out for a peace deal, blaming Israel’s West Bank barrier and the spread of Jewish settlements for undermining the prospects of a future Palestinian state.
“Time is definitely running out for the two-state solution,” despite Palestinian commitment since the 1980s to accept the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the limits of national aspirations, Arafat said in interview with Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
Violence continued on the ground, with the killing of Ashraf Nasser Mbayed, 25, and Samir Khalil Mbayed, 23, near a security barrier separating Gaza from Israel.
At their funeral, loudspeakers announced that the pair belonged to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Arafat’s Fatah movement. Hundreds of people, including hooded men carrying weapons, attended the funeral.
Israeli military sources confirmed the incident in a border area close to the southern Israeli kibbutz of Nahal Oz.
“Israeli troops opened fire toward two Palestinians as they were less than 200 meters from a banned zone,” a source said. “Binoculars were found near the bodies suggesting they were there to monitor army movements in preparation for an attack.”
The deaths brought the number of people killed since the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000 to 3,708, including 2,776 Palestinians and 865 Israelis.
Meanwhile, yet another attempt to prod the two sides back toward the peace table was in the works.
Two US officials, David Satterfield, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, and John Wolf, chief of the US team monitoring roadmap compliance, are heading to the region early next week.
Their agenda is still being prepared, said an American diplomat in Jerusalem, but they are expected to meet with both Israeli and Palestinian officials. Palestinian negotiations minister Saeb Erakat said that the key issue he will raise in the talks will be the controversial barrier, which at places juts deep into Palestinian territory.
Echoing Arafat, he said that “for us, the principal question will be that of the wall, whose construction means the destruction of the two-state option and an end to hopes of relaunching of the peace process.”
Arafat, branded by both the United States and Israel as the number-one obstacle to any resumption of peace talks, has accused Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of refusing to comply with the demands of the roadmap, which foresees the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005.
Israeli officials said Friday that Sharon is likely to visit Washington in February ahead of an International Court of Justice hearing on the legality of the barrier, which often juts deep into Palestinian territory.
He is also likely to set out his “disengagement plan,” Israeli media have said. He warned in December that if the Palestinians failed to meet their obligations under the roadmap, he would disengage from the peace process and impose new borders unilaterally. But he is likely to be scolded by Bush, who has labeled the barrier a “problem,” for the lack of progress in implementing the roadmap. The Guardian also spoke with Hamas political leader Abdelaziz Rantissi and Islamic Jihad’s Gaza spokesman Nafez Azzam, who said they would accept a Palestinian state as a “temporary solution” in exchange for a halt to their armed struggle.
Rantissi added, however, that his group would offer no more comprehensive cease-fires without a full Israeli withdrawal.
He also warned of “new methods of resistance and new weapons,” even if the security barrier eventually encloses all main Palestinian areas. Rantissi defended bombings as a means to shift “the balance of suffering,” saying the “number of Palestinian children killed by the Israelis in the past three years is almost as high as the total number of Israeli deaths.”
“These operations have only one target — to deter the killing of our children and civilians. If they stop killing our civilians, we will stop... We do not have a cult of death, we have a cult of dignity.”
