Nazir Majally, Asharq Al-Awsat

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 13 December 2003 — Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei warned Israel yesterday that a controversial wall it is building in the West Bank would kill the US-backed Middle East peace plan.

Adding to pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a new opinion poll showed half of Israelis see him as untrustworthy amid signs he is considering a go-it-alone plan to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians on Israel’s terms.

Tens of thousands of Hamas supporters, some of them masked, rallied in two Gaza refugee camps yesterday to mark 16 years since the group’s founding.

Vowing new suicide bombings in Israel, organizers shouted through loudspeakers: “Our fighters will continue to blow themselves up in the depths of the Zionist entity.”

With the road map stymied by mutual mistrust, Sharon has said he may evacuate some isolated settlements and set borders along the barrier, in effect annexing occupied land where Palestinians seek statehood as envisaged by the road map.

“(The wall) will kill the (peace) process. It will kill anyone who speaks of peace... Now there is relative quiet. But the terror will start anew. The barrier can’t prevent it,” Qorei told Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest daily, in an interview.

Relative calm has prevailed for weeks. But in a flare-up before dawn yesterday, Palestinian gunmen wounded seven ultra-Orthodox Jews who defied Israeli military orders by praying at a shrine in the West Bank city of Nablus.

Israeli security sources said one of the Jews was critically wounded when gunmen fired at their vehicle.

Meanwhile, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom yesterday called for the immediate resumption of peace talks with Palestinians and said the Jewish state would unveil new plans to promote dialogue next week.

Shalom, who briefed US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Israel’s ideas for a new “positive agenda” to improve the living conditions of the Palestinians, said Prime Minister Sharon would make details public next week.

“We talked about many issues including the plans of the Israeli government and the Israeli prime minister,” Shalom told reporters in Washington after his meeting with Powell.

“If the Palestinians are serious about it, we would like to resume negotiations with them immediately,” Shalom said, stressing, however, that there could be no preconditions for talks.

“We are still waiting for the willingness of the Palestinians to have the summit between Prime Minister Sharon and Abu Ala and we hope that it will take place in the near future,” he said.

Describing the current stalemate in the Middle East peace process, a United Nations official yesterday said Israelis, the Palestinians and the donor community, which gives a billion dollars annually to the Palestinians, are caught in a Catch-22.

“The issue today is how to start the (peace) process,” Terje Roed- Larsen told the UN Security Council in a monthly informative session on the Middle East situation.

He said the core concerns in the conflict are “territory and terror”.

Hundreds of Israelis, mainly Jewish settlers, flocked yesterday to Netzarim in the northern Gaza Strip to support residents of this isolated settlement whose evacuation is the subject of heated political debates.

The pro-settler militants were due to spend Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, in Netzarim, as part of a campaign launched by the Yesha Council of Settlements to counter any plans for dismantling Jewish outposts in the occupied territories.

— Additional input from agencies