JERUSALEM, Dec. 22 -- Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Wednesday endorsed a proposal by visiting Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain for a new international conference that would pave the way toward new peace negotiations.
Blair, the most prominent foreign official to visit the region since the death of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, six weeks ago, met with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and several other top Israeli officials, then traveled to the West Bank city of Ramallah for a session with Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat's successor as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, meeting with PLO head Mahmoud Abbas, left, and Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Queria, center, said he wanted to "get back . . . toward the two-state solution" to the Middle East crisis, ending with the Palestinian state envisioned by the road map.
(Kevin Frayer -- AP)
|
|
At both stops, Blair proposed a one-day conference for March in London that would focus on helping the Palestinians with political and security reforms. He assured each side that the meeting would not supplant efforts for a final peace deal. He also promised Palestinian leaders that the session was not intended to pressure them to accept Israeli demands.
Instead, Blair said, the conference would be geared toward addressing the Palestinians' most pressing needs at a key juncture in their four-year-old uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians are to vote Jan. 9 to elect Arafat's successor as president of the Palestinian Authority. At the same time, Sharon is pushing forward with a plan to remove all settlers and troops from Gaza, as well as part of the West Bank, beginning next summer.
In that context, it is crucial that "we have in place a proper and viable plan" to reform the Palestinian Authority's political and economic institutions and bolster its security forces so that they can halt attacks on Israeli targets, Blair said.
"My purpose is to be of help to the Palestinian Authority and its people so that we can get back to the 'road map' negotiations toward the two-state solution and the viable Palestinian state at the end of it that we all want to see," he said in a joint news conference with Abbas in Ramallah.
The road map was a U.S.-backed peace plan that called for a series of reciprocal steps toward the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005. It has been dormant for more than a year.
Abbas, a former Palestinian prime minister whom several opinion polls have identified as the front-runner in next month's presidential election, said he welcomed Blair's proposal. He responded to Blair's call for an end to terrorism, however, by saying that Israel needed to stop construction of a barrier separating itself from much of the West Bank and to curtail the growth of Jewish settlements before the road map process could be resumed.
"What we demand from the Israeli side and what we expect from the Israeli side is the cessation of the aggression against our Palestinian people," said Abbas, who last week said it had been "a mistake" to employ violence during the uprising and called on Palestinians to fight Israeli occupation through peaceful means.
In a news conference with Sharon on Wednesday morning, Blair stressed: "Let me make one thing clear: There is not going to be any successful negotiation or peace without an end to terrorism. . . . That is my position, and I think, if I can put it to you in this way, I think that is the position of the vast majority of the international community."
Sharon called Blair's proposal "very, very important." He said Israel would not attend the conference because the issues to be discussed would more properly be left to the Palestinians and to foreign donor countries, but he said he told Blair "that we welcome his initiative."
As if to underscore the obstacles facing Blair's initiative, violence flared in both the West Bank and Gaza on Wednesday. Palestinian gunmen fired on a group of civilian contractors working on the separation barrier near the village of Idna in the southern West Bank, killing one Israeli, according to an Israeli military spokesman.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces entered the town of Khan Younis in southern Gaza for a second time this week, attempting to stop Palestinians from firing missiles and mortar shells at Jewish settlements and Israeli military bases. Israeli troops killed three Palestinians, according to witnesses quoted by the Reuters news agency. Soldiers reported firing on and hitting three gunmen in separate incidents but did not know whether they had been killed, the military spokesman said.
In addition, officials said the fatal stabbing of a woman in an Israeli town on Tuesday had been carried out by a Palestinian who apparently breached the community's security fence. Ariella Fahima, 39, a mother of four, was killed in front of her home in Moshav Nehusha, about a mile from the Green Line that divides Israel and the West Bank.
