Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, were consulting early Wednesday on whether Peres should go ahead with a planned meeting with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat after a blast in the Gaza Strip that wounded five Israeli soldiers, a government spokesman told AFP.
"Foreign Minister Peres and Mr. Sharon are meeting right now, and they will decide within half an hour," said Sharon's spokesman Avi Pazner.
Five Israeli soldiers were hurt, one seriously, when a bomb went off near their military post in the southern Gaza Strip early Wednesday.
The Tel Aviv-based Haaretz newspaper quoted Israeli Radio as saying that the meeting would go on as scheduled at 9:30am.
Following the blast, Israeli tanks shelled residential areas in Rafah, wounding four Palestinians, reported the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA.
ISRAELI COALITION GOV'T TENSE OVER MEETING
The Arafat-Peres meeting was authorized by Sharon in an effort to shore up his fraying coalition, strained almost to the breaking point by previous cancellations.
The talks come one day after a planned trip by Arafat to Damascus was unexpectedly called off.
The last-minute cancellation of the Arafat talks in Syria, for the third time in three months, dealt a severe blow to the thaw in Syrian-Palestinian relations that had characterized the past few months, said AFP.
The Peres-Arafat meeting, to take place at the Dehaniyeh Airport in Gaza, is expected to end with a joint declaration on a ceasefire and plans for implementing the Mitchell Report, Haaretz and AFP reported.
The two men will then meet again in about a week, after both sides have begun implementing the measures stipulated in the joint declaration.
Peres told a meeting of Labor MKs on Tuesday that this second meeting "is not dependent on events."
According to Haaretz, the measures to be implemented during the first week include the following:
-The joint Israeli-Palestinian security committee will resume operation, with CIA representatives serving as supervisors and arbiters.
-Israel will remove the closure on areas where quiet is maintained and will make it easier for Palestinians to travel between Palestinian cities.
-According to Peres, the Palestinians have pledged to arrest suspected “terrorists” and start collecting illegal weapons.
The joint declaration, however, does not mention this last point; it is a very general document, formulated as a compromise between Israeli and Palestinian demands by Peres and two Palestinian negotiators, Abu Ala and Saeb Eriekat, over the weekend.
After the first week, assuming that quiet is maintained, Israel will withdraw its forces to the positions they occupied before last September's outbreak of the latest Intifada against 34 years of Israeli military occupation.
In addition, the international border crossings and the Dehaniyeh Airport will be reopened and additional Palestinians will be allowed to work in Israel, added Haaretz.
This plan, as a whole, will be considered the initial implementation of the Mitchell Report, which calls for a ceasefire, a six-week cooling-off period and then confidence-building measures, including an Israeli freeze on settlement construction.
Meanwhile, Peres told Labor Party ministers Tuesday that he had already arranged a second meeting with Arafat, which will take place next week. He said there had been a “dramatic” drop in violence in the territories and that Arafat was making a “serious” effort to reduce the violence.
"It is very difficult to reach the point of zero shooting," he told Israel Radio.
"The fact is, there is a drop [in violence]. It's not enough, it's not absolute. We have to continue working! I am one of the people who is trying to bring about a cease-fire under the very difficult conditions that exist." -Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
