DAMASCUS/JERUSALEM, 20 September 2007 — Syria yesterday rejected as “trickery” a call by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to hold unconditional negotiations with Damascus, with whom the Jewish state is technically still at war. “What is new in Olmert’s proposals is the respectful tone, but the rest is only a repetition of old proposals aiming to trick and divide,” the official Tishrin newspaper said in an editorial.
“If Israel were truly committed to peace ... it would return to negotiations at the point where they were halted,” the paper said. Peace negotiations broke off in January 2000, largely over the Syrian Golan Heights, occupied by the Jewish state in 1967 and annexed in 1981. Talks have remained frozen ever since.
“If Olmert were a man of peace, he would not have launched the war last year against the people of Lebanon, nor ordered his government to violate Syrian airspace and would have brought a halt to Israeli human rights violations in the Palestinian territories,” the paper said.
Last year’s 34-day war was sparked by the Shiite Hezbollah capture of two Israeli soldiers but saw some 1,200 Lebanese killed in an air and ground onslaught. The soldiers remain in the hands of Hezbollah.
Syria said on Sept. 6 that its anti-aircraft defense batteries had opened fire on Israeli warplanes flying over its territory, an operation that has never been confirmed by Israel but raised tensions between the two.
On Tuesday, Tishrin accused Israel’s major ally, the United States, of spreading lies “according to which Israeli planes overflew Syria and took pictures of probable nuclear installations provided by (North) Korea.” North Korea has denied any involvement with any nuclear program in Syria.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday her government would not stand in the way of Israeli-Syrian peace talks but that she still considered Damascus a destabilizing influence.
“We’re not standing in the way. If Israel and Syria believe that they can come to agreement, then they should come to agreement,” Rice told reporters traveling with her to the Middle East.
“We haven’t seen anything in Syrian behavior to this point that suggests that Syria is doing anything but acting in a destabilizing way in the Middle East,” she said. “But, you know, the United States is never going to stand in the way of states that want to make peace.”
In another development, a Palestinian man was shot to death yesterday as Israeli troops and Palestinian fighters traded heavy gunfire in an Israeli Army raid on a West Bank refugee camp.
Relatives said Adib Salim Damoni, a 38-year-old handicapped man, was standing unarmed at a window of his home at the Ein Bet Ilmeh camp near Nablus when a bullet hit him in the neck.
The Israeli Army, which launched the raid on Tuesday, said troops shot a militant while trying to root out a cell of Hamas and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine fighters that had planned an attack in Israel.
Explosive blasts and flashes of light split the air at the camp, and plumes of black smoke billowed into the sky. Electricity was cut off, leaving the 5,000 residents of the crowded camp without power, and some families reported having no water.
Soldiers have been conducting house-to-house searches in the camp’s narrow alleys, knocking down walls to get from one building to the next, witnesses said.
A curfew has been in force in the camp since Tuesday, with no one allowed to enter or leave, including Palestinian ambulances, they said. The army spokesman said it was checking the witnesses’ reports and why electricity and water supplies were disrupted.
