CAIRO/GAZA CITY, 21 August 2004 — Two senior Egyptian officials will meet representatives from Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction during a visit to the Palestinian territories, an Egyptian newspaper said yesterday. The semi-official Al-Ahram daily reported Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit and intelligence chief Omar Suleiman will also discuss Palestinian security reorganization with Arafat during the visit planned for the end of August.
Egypt fears anarchy could follow any Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and allow Islamist groups to take over the narrow wedge of land that is home to 1.3 million people. “Abul Gheit and Suleiman are due to meet officials from the Fatah organization during their visit... Arafat is expected to send a delegation of senior Fatah officials to Egypt in the beginning of the coming month,” the newspaper said.
Al-Ahram added the visits were in the framework “of talks between Egypt and the Palestinian factions to facilitate the possibility of forming a plan of national action with full agreement by the end of September.”
Egypt reached an agreement last week with Palestinian militant group Hamas on guaranteeing Palestinian unity following a possible Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Abul Gheit and Suleiman will also travel to Israel to meet Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to discuss the Israeli plan to withdraw from Gaza. Al-Ahram said the talks with Arafat will include the issue of unifying the Palestinian security bodies into three bodies.
Meanwhile, Israeli Public Security Minister Tzahi Hanegbi vowed yesterday Israel will not give in to any of the demands of the thousands of Palestinians who are on hunger strike in Israeli jails. Israel Radio quoted Hanegbi as making the remark after holding a situation assessment with officials of the Israeli prisons authority, who briefed him on the number of fasting inmates and their condition.
The minister said the prisons authority was preparing for the possibility that the strike would last months. Asked if he stood by his remark of last week that as far as he was concerned the prisoners could strike until they died, he said: “My opinion has not changed.”
Exactly 3,000 of the 3,800 Palestinian “security prisoners” in eight Israeli jails were refusing to eat yesterday, as the mass hunger strike entered its sixth day, a prisons authority spokesman said.
The strike, which had been planned a year in advance, began Sunday with about 1,500 inmates in four Israeli prisons, but has since spread to double that number and to include nearly 80 per cent of all Palestinian security prisoners in Israel’s jails.
The prisoners, who are drinking water but not eating, are demanding improved conditions, including access to telephones, contacts with visitors without dividing glass panels and an end to what they term “intrusive” strip searches. Israel, however, says it will not heed the demands because jailed militants have used mobile phones smuggled into their cells and notes passed to visiting relatives to continue directing attacks against Israelis from within the prison walls.
A senior Hamas official warned yesterday that the resistance movement could abduct Israeli soldiers to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners.
“All options, which include the kidnap of soldiers, are open,” Nizar Rayan told AFP as he joined a march in northern Gaza in solidarity with hundreds of hunger striking prisoners. “If they are not released, we will free them by other means,” added Rayan.
In another development, Israel’s opposition Labour Party leader pushed an already embattled prime minister to the wall by advocating early elections a day after Ariel Sharon’s Likud party barred him from coalition negotiations.
Shimon Peres effectively closed the door to further talks with Sharon, who needs the center-left party to push through his Gaza pullout plan, but left open the possibility of future negotiations should an unlikely majority in Labour agree. Sharon had vowed to press ahead with the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip despite a humiliating rebuff from Likud that voted on Wednesday against bringing Labour into the government.
Peres, a strong proponent of ceding occupied land for peace, said he would continue to support the Gaza pullout but suggested Sharon had been too seriously weakened by the revolt of Likud rightists to pursue talks with the main opposition party.
“The opinion of the Labour Party today is to call for new elections and allow the people to decide,” Peres, a veteran former prime minister and foreign minister, told journalists.
He said elections, which do not have to be held until 2006, should take place “as soon as possible, the minute there is a majority in the Knesset,” Israel’s Parliament.
