Nazir Majally, Asharq Al-Awsat

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 2 December 2003 — Israeli forces raided Ramallah in the West Bank yesterday, killing four people, including a six-year-old boy, and destroying a building that was home to 60.

The Israeli actions came as Palestinian officials and hard-liners prepared to meet in Cairo to weigh a cease-fire with Israel and a model Middle East peace treaty was unveiled in Geneva.

The army said its overnight raid targeted the Hamas infrastructure in the Ramallah area. The military said it had killed three militants and made dozens of arrests. Palestinians said a six-year-old boy was also among the dead.

An Israeli developer meanwhile began construction of new settlements in East Jerusalem. The housing project drew criticism from US, UN and Palestinian officials.

Despite their concerns, bulldozers pushed ahead in the morning with road construction for the neighborhood of “Nof Zahav,” or Golden View. The development will abut Jabel Mukaber, a Palestinian village, in the area Israel annexed after capturing the Arab section of Jerusalem in the 1967 war.

The Jerusalem municipality said permits had recently been granted for the road construction, and said the project would include 400 housing units.

The project would be the first new Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem since two contentious developments in the late 1990s — the sprawling hilltop neighborhood of Har Homa and a small Jewish housing project in the Arab neighborhood Ras Al-Amoud.

The construction came as US envoy William Burns was meeting with Israeli officials in hopes of reviving the road map for peace in the region. The road map, meant to end three years of violence and pave the way toward an independent Palestinian state by 2005, forbids any new Israeli “settlement activity.” It also requires the Palestinians to dismantle militant groups.

The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.

A US government official said Washington viewed new construction in parts of Jerusalem occupied in 1967 as settlement activity which was therefore “inconsistent with the road map.”

Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN representative in the region, called the new housing project “damaging” to peace efforts.

Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator, said, “We call on the Israeli government to stop these facts on the ground and opt for serious negotiations that will end this vicious cycle and lead to a two-state solution.”

In Geneva, world leaders gave strong backing to an unofficial Middle East peace plan denounced as treacherous by both Israeli officials and Palestinian militants. As its authors, self-proclaimed moderates from both sides of Palestinian-Israeli divide, launched the plan at a ceremony, senior figures from around the globe called it a ray of hope in one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.

“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken far too great a toll already. Both peoples have paid dearly in lives and livelihood in a war which both are losing,” declared a statement signed by 58 leading politicians, including many former presidents and prime ministers.

The “Geneva Initiative” was co-authored by former Israeli government minister Yossi Beilin, an architect of the now effectively defunct 1993 Oslo peace accords, and former Palestinian minister Yasser Abed Rabbo.