-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2002/0412/3968409593FR12HORINSIDE.h
tml
}}}>Begin
Sharon sets terms for leaving West Bank
>From David Horovitz, in Jerusalem
12/04/2002
THE MIDDLE EAST: As the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, flew into Israel
last night, the Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, issued a series of firm preconditions
for the withdrawal of troops from the West Bank, which would seem to put him on
collision course with the Bush administration.
Two weeks into the "Operation Defensive Shield" offensive he launched in the wake
of a series of suicide attacks inside Israel, Mr Sharon declared that the army would
not pull back from the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat's besieged
Ramallah headquarters until several men also inside, alleged by Israel to have
purchased weaponry for the PA and to have orchestrated the murder of the Israeli
tourism minister last October, came out and surrendered - something Mr Arafat has
vowed will not happen.
Furthermore, the prime minister said, soldiers were "not about to leave" the other
major West Bank cities - Bethlehem, Jenin and Nablus - until all pockets of armed
resistance had been quieted, "and all the terrorists have surrendered".
Even then, they would only withdraw to the outskirts of the cities, he said. A further
pullback to "security areas" would only be authorised, he indicated, after a prolonged
period of calm.
And in the clearest definition yet of those security areas, or "buffer zones", which he
has said he will establish inside the West Bank along the Israeli border to prevent
suicide bombings, Mr Sharon was quoted as saying the zones would be some five
kilometres wide.
Not only are such conditions entirely unacceptable to the Palestinians - who have
demanded a full Israeli withdrawal from areas entered in the past two weeks as their
precondition for a ceasefire effort - they are manifestly unacceptable to Mr Powell as
well. Aides to Mr Sharon were pleased to hear Mr Powell and other Bush
administration officials softening their language yesterday when discussing the need
for an Israeli pull-out, no longer employing the phrase "without delay". They
attributed
this to the partial withdrawals sanctioned by Mr Sharon in recent days - from Tulkarm
and Qalkilya and some two dozen smaller population centres - and to a lobbying
effort led by the former Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, on Capitol Hill.
Nevertheless, Mr Sharon's demands can hardly strike Mr Powell as anything but
unhelpful, particularly when Israeli troops are still periodically entering fresh
areas of
Palestinian- controlled territory in their hunt for intifada activists, and when
evidence
of the devastation the fighting has wreaked in places like Nablus and Jenin becomes
daily more plain.
The army is still maintaining a "closure" order in Jenin refugee camp, where most
accounts suggest that at least 100 Palestinians - mainly gunmen, but civilians as well
- have been killed over the past week.
But the Palestinians were yesterday burying some of the 70 bodies of those killed in
Nablus. And both residents of the Jenin camp, who had fled the fighting, and Israeli
soldiers, spoke dramatically of bodies left out in the street for days, and of large
numbers of homes demolished - in the course of the fighting, and by the army, to
enable tank access and to prevent booby-trapped bomb explosions of the kind that
killed 13 soldiers on Wednesday.
Ms Karin Abu Ziyad, the deputy head of UNRWA - the United Nations Relief and
Works Agency which provides aid for the refugees - said that some 3,000 people
had lost their homes in the fighting. Palestinian Authority, and Hamas and Islamic
Jihad spokesmen, have alternated between describing the warfare in Jenin as
"heroic resistance" by gunmen and an Israeli massacre. Israeli officials have insisted
that they tried to prevent civilian casualties and that they were confronting the
intifada
"hardcore" responsible for many suicide bombings.
� The Irish Times
End<{{{
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