OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 6 July 2004 — The sponsors of the troubled Middle East “road map” peace plan are to meet in Jerusalem today following high-level talks between Israel and Egypt over the Jewish state’s planned pullout from Gaza.
Diplomats from the so-called quartet — Russia, the European Union, United States and United Nations — are to gather at the UN’s offices in Jerusalem, a UN spokeswoman here said.
It was to be a follow-up to a June 24 meeting in Egypt during which they backed an initiative by Cairo to underpin security after the Gaza Strip withdrawal.
US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield, Russia’s Middle East envoy Alexander Kalugin, EU representative Marc Otte and Terje-Roed Larsen from the UN were all expected to attend the first meeting in Israel or the Palestinian territories this year, a UN spokeswoman told AFP.
Speaking after the weekly Cabinet meeting in the West Bank town of Ramallah, Palestinian Premier Ahmed Qorei said he hoped today’s meeting would signal the start of a greater involvement in the peace process by the quartet.
“We hope that the quartet will be meeting more often and reinforce its supervision of the situation on the ground in order to resurrect the road map and the final-status negotiations,” he told reporters.
The road map, which aims to create a Palestinian state by 2005, was unveiled amid great fanfare last year but has made virtually no progress since.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has vowed to dismantle all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza by the end of 2005.
Another four settlements will also be evacuated in the northern West Bank, but Sharon in turn plans to keep hold of larger settlement blocs in the Palestinian territory.
Egypt has proposed sending 150 to 200 police officers to train a Palestinian force
of some 30,000 police to fill any security vacuum in neighboring Gaza after the pullout.
The Israeli Defense Ministry confirmed yesterday that a senior official paid a secret visit to Cairo over the weekend and held talks with Egyptian intelligence services chief Omar Suleiman.
The talks between Reserve General Amos Gilad, chief advisor to Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, and Suleiman were thought to have centered on the prospects of Israel handing over control of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt after Israel’s pullout.
Mofaz warned last month that Israel would not cede control of the area along the border known as the “Philadelphi Road” unless it received Egyptian guarantees that its security forces would end the smuggling of weapons into Gaza.
Qorei said that Suleiman was expected to return to Ramallah later in July for another round of talks with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat whom he met late last month.
Settlers meanwhile stepped up their opposition to the Gaza pullout plan by unveiling plans for a mass petition and a human chain linking the main Gush Katif settlement bloc to Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, a distance of around 100 kilometers.
The aim of the campaign is to explain “that the entire country (and not just the settlers) will suffer should the plan go into effect,” the Yesha settlers’ council said in a statement.
In Tunis, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has said in an independence day message to his US counterpart George W. Bush that Tunisia wants to work closely with the United States to restore peace in the Middle East.
“We are determined to continue dialogue and consultations to find a way... to build on the two countries’ contributions in bringing security, stability and peace to the Middle East and throughout the world,” Ben Ali was quoted by the official TAP news agency as saying.
Tunis has frequently called for the resumption of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and has recently shown signs of wanting to normalize relations with Israel, which have been frozen for four years.
The Tunisian president said he was “deeply satisfied with the solid and excellent relations” between Tunis and Washington, adding that he wanted to “consolidate and diversify those relations to raise them to the level of strategic partnership.”
