The Palestinian-Israeli ceasefire was under heavy pressure Tuesday after the deadliest day of fighting since its Wednesday start, with Arab leaders warning it could be doomed and right-wing Israelis saying it must be scrapped.
Palestinian and Israeli security chiefs ended a "strained" US-supervised meeting on the fragile ceasefire late Monday with no sign of a breakthrough, according to repots.
Earlier in the day, Palestinian automatic weapon attacks in the West Bank left two Jewish settlers dead and two injured, while a Palestinian shot by Israeli troops Sunday also died of his wounds. An elderly Palestinian was also killed when a Jewish settler ran him over.
"This is not a ceasefire," Raanan Gissin, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told AFP, condemning the “violence” as a "flagrant violation" of the ceasefire hammered out under the mediation of US intelligence chief George Tenet.
"We are talking about continuous shooting every day," Gissin said. "Every day we bury someone else."
He said it would be "impossible" for Israel to go ahead with confidence-building measures, such as an end to settlement building in the Occupied Territories, unless there was a complete halt to the “violence.”
The Council of Jewish Settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip urged Sharon, whose pledge to ensure their security was one of the central planks of his election platform, to call off the ceasefire immediately, according to Haaretz.
"Sharon's government has fallen into the trap of the so-called ceasefire and lifted the siege on Palestinian towns, so it is responsible for this murderous attack," the group said in a statement, cited by the paper.
On the ground, Jewish settlers retaliated for the killings with acts of vandalism late Monday in the Palestinian village of Umm Safa near the West Bank town of Ramallah, Haaretz said.
The Israeli police intervened and made arrests, but dozens of settlers then turned on the Israeli police to get their arrested friends released, a settler source said.
Arab foreign ministers, meeting in Amman, warned that the fragile ceasefire could collapse entirely unless international observers were sent to monitor the truce.
"The situation now is dangerous, very dangerous, and international efforts must be deployed to end the crisis," Palestinian President Yasser Arafat said at the end of the Arab League ministerial committee meeting.
Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa said the six-day-old, US-brokered "fragile ceasefire will not take roots unless there is a lifting of the blockade and an end to (Jewish) settlements," AFP quoted him as saying.
So far, Sharon has resisted the growing pressure to declare the ceasefire the latest casualty of the nine months of Intifada.
The former general, meeting with MPs from his right-wing Likud party, said Israel had nothing to gain, at the moment, by responding with renewed attacks on the Palestinians, Haaretz quoted him as saying.
"I've no intention of heeding the war cries of some people," Sharon said. "War can only be the last resort and nothing justifies it in the current situation." – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
