RAMALLAH, West Bank, 8 July 2004 — Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei said yesterday that the Palestinians would use an upcoming world court verdict as a lever to increase international opposition to Israel’s West Bank wall.
Qorei said after meeting representatives of the Middle East quartet — the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia — that he was expecting a “just decision” when the Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivers its non-binding opinion on the legality of the barrier tomorrow.
“We spoke a lot about the wall. We told them there can be no hope for peace while the wall is still on the ground,” Qorei told reporters. “This wall is being built in order to take more of our land and not for security reasons.
“We told them that we are awaiting the verdict of the court in The Hague ... which we hope will be a just decision. We will then go to the United Nations and the whole world. We will not stay silent about the wall.”
Meanwhile, in a joint statement issued after the meeting with Qorei in his West Bank offices, the quartet said the Palestinian Authority must stop being so passive in meeting its security commitments.
“Noting the vital importance of security in creating a climate in which forward movement is possible, the envoys stressed that the Palestinian Authority (PA) must make progress on its security-related obligations under the road map,” the statement said.
The Israeli government has already made clear that it has no intention of calling a halt to construction of the barrier, regardless of the verdict.
Israel insists the barrier is necessary to prevent suicide attacks on its territory but the Palestinians argue that its route, which often juts deep into the West Bank, shows its real intent is to pre-empt the borders of their promised future state.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom has been in Washington in a bid to secure help to prevent a negative outcome snowballing into a censure motion at the UN Security Council.
Shalom said yesterday that “all the American leaders, whether in government or Congress, have told us that they support the security fence”.
The United States has itself said that the barrier’s route is a “problem” but has argued the world court is an inappropriate forum for the issue to be decided. However, Shalom was forced yesterday to play down embarrassing criticism over Israel’s failure to remove Jewish settlement outposts after US Secretary of State Coin Powell voiced Washington’s “disappointment”.
Powell’s remarks at a press conference on Tuesday did not reflect the overall tenor of the pair’s earlier meeting, said Shalom. “I met with Powell for over an hour and the question of the settlements was only briefly raised at the end of the discussion,” the minister told Israeli public radio.
Powell told reporters he had “explained to the minister (Shalom) that we have some disappointment in the rate of which outposts have been removed and the minister gave me assurances they are hard at work on that”.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon agreed to tear down all outposts erected since he came to power in 2001 when he endorsed the quartet’s road map peace plan last summer, which also called on Israel to halt all expansion of existing settlements.
The Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now has said that more outposts have been erected than dismantled in the occupied territories since the road map was endorsed.
On the ground, a wanted Palestinian militant was killed by an undercover Israeli army unit in Nablus’ Balata refugee camp yesterday. Palestinian sources named the man as Issam Mahameed, 27, and said he was a member of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades — an armed group loosely affiliated to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s mainstream Fatah party.
Three people, including a four-year-old boy, were also wounded in Gaza when a car belonging to members of the Hamas group exploded.
The three, who included a father and his young son, were injured as they walked close to the car in the north of Gaza City. An AFP photographer at the scene said he saw fragments of a missile with Hebrew writing on it, while witnesses said Israeli Army helicopters had been seen flying overhead at the time of the blast.
