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Topic: Middle East breakthrough reported
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Kindgo
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Arafat Prepares Victory March ![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
DEBKAfile Special Report Updating DEBKA-Net-Weekly June 27 Exclusive
June 28, 2003, 3:10 PM (GMT+02:00)
Gathers the rewards of terror
For the Palestinians to begin upholding their June 4 Aqaba summit pledges, another strong shove was needed from Washington. It was administered this week in a telephone call from US secretary of state Colin Powell to Palestinian internal security minister Mohamed Dahlan. DEBKAfile’s Washington sources report Powell as saying in effect: The Hamas everyone is talking about is made up of no more than 500 to 1,000 armed men. If Dahlan can’t get them under control and stop their terrorist activity, “someone else” will take over and finish them off one by one.
A demonstration quickly followed. Early Friday, June 27, a team of the Israeli naval commando Unit 13 raided a Hamas fastness in the southern Gaza Strip, killing three terrorists and capturing another three. The Israeli side lost one fighter, Staff Sgt. Erez Ashkenazi, 21, from Kibbutz Reshafim.
A few hours later, the Palestinian minister dropped his unremitting demands for Israeli and American concessions and resigned himself to finally talking turkey. He agreed to assume Palestinian responsibility for terror prevention in the areas turned over by the Israeli military and promised also to act on Israeli intelligence tip-offs on impending attacks. Whereupon Israel set a date for pulling its troops back from the Gaza Strip and Bethlehem, starting Monday, June 30 and reopening its borders to Palestinian traffic.
The deal is far from perfect. The Palestinian commitment defers action to stop Qassam missile and mortar strikes against Israeli locations in the Gaza Strip and southern Israeli to some time in the future. Moreover, there is no timeline for the dismantlement of terrorist organizations promised by Abu Mazan and strenuously demanded by Israel and President George W. Bush. The Abu Mazen-Dahlan team is counting on saving themselves the trouble of breaking up the Hamas, Fatah and Jihad Islami terror groups by accepting the flimsy ceasefire on offer despite its tough conditions.
Yet Israel is pulling back pretty much to the lines it held up until Yasser Arafat’s armed confrontation erupted on September 29, 2000. A trilateral US-Israeli-Palestinian mechanism led by the American CIA is left to monitor the implementation of these accords - even though this recipe failed disastrously once before. The same mechanism collapsed in the hail of bullets the Palestinian liaison officers fired at their Israeli counterparts soon after September 29 while they were on joint patrols and together in their shared liaison headquarters.
Still, the White House is cautiously praising the new arrangements. Powell pronounced them a step forward in the long haul toward a Palestinian state. Backed by the winds of optimism blowing from Washington, the US president’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, lands in the region Saturday, June 28, to usher in the new chapter and mark its place in the frame of overall US Middle East planning. Saturday she holds talks with Palestinian leaders followed by meetings with Israeli leaders on Sunday.
In the welter of accords, palaver and cautious celebrations, no one is mentioning Yasser Arafat or checking to see how irrelevant he really is to all the new arrangements.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Palestinian sources rectified this omission in its latest issue of June 28.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Palestinian sources reveal that the Palestinian president Yasser Arafat has big plans for the coming period of “calm”. For some weeks, he and his senior aides have been working on preparations for a grand victory march. Among its objectives will be a demonstration that Arafat was clever enough to extort American and Israeli recognition for a Palestinian state by a sustained campaign of terror, that he is not done yet, and that Palestinian prime minister Abbas is a nobody who had the gall to challenge his authority.
Some of the ministers whom Arafat planted in the Abbas cabinet joined in the preparations. The march will reach its climax with Arafat’s arrival in the Gaza Strip. He will be presented as the savior whose brilliant policies brought about the removal of Israel’s military presence from the territory and delivered him from the Israeli siege that kept him trapped in Ramallah from May 2002.
The fact that for the last six months Arafat has been free to travel where he pleased in Palestinian areas or overseas will not be mentioned for fear of marring his appearance of great suffering in the Palestinian cause.
What really kept him confined to his quarters in Ramallah, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Palestinian sources stress, was his obligation to shelter the 180-200 master-terrorists of his own Fatah, Tanzim and Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, as well as masterminds of the Popular Fronts, the Hamas and a group of Hizballah agents who were planted on the West Bank. All of them are wanted by Israel for orchestrating major terrorist attacks and murder and live under Arafat personal protection. His presence in the Ramallah headquarters guarantees their safety. Since Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon promised President George W. Bush that he would not harm Arafat in person, the wanted terrorists under his protection are out of Israel’s reach.
This immunity was again demonstrated after the Aqaba summit on June 4 when Sharon gave the US president another promise, this one to restrict the Israeli campaign of targeted assassinations against terrorist activists to members of Hamas in the Gaza Strip and “ticking bombs”, meaning suicide terrorists on their way to target with explosives on their person.
Since June 4, senior terrorist commanders, controllers and recruiters have accordingly been immune from Israeli preventive operations.
Word that Israeli troops will soon quit Bethlehem has generated an exodus to this future safe haven of hundreds of wanted Palestinian terrorists from their strongholds all over the West Bank to escape Israeli capture and liquidations. They are now gathering in Bethlehem region of the West Bank abutting Jerusalem which was cleansed of terrorists to stop the Palestinian shooting campaign that long plagued the Jerusalem district of Gilo.
As a result of the immunity won at Aqaba, some of the master terrorists sheltered by Arafat have begun trickling out of the Ramallah headquarters – at first staying close to their havens, but soon moving farther afield to West Bank towns.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s counter-terror exports say that these escapees from Arafat’s quarters have three things in common:
1. They make sure to return “home” before dark and stay there till morning.
2. They are handed detailed instructions by Muhamed Damra, Arafat’s chief operations officer, regarding their West Bank destinations, which terror cells to contact and what terror operations to set up until a “ceasefire” goes into effect. That is why all the shooting and suicide attacks in the last few days, most of them thwarted, emanated from the West Bank and not the Gaza Strip.
3. They have been put to work designing a terror campaign in the post-ceasefire period - also from the West Bank. Like Israel’s military withdrawals, it will be executed in stages, the infrastructures restored in the areas evacuated by Israeli troops.
DEBKAfile adds: To make sure the Palestinians and everyone else understands who really calls the shots, Arafat summoned Palestinian security and intelligence officers, including Dahlan, to a conference at his Ramallah headquarters Friday night, June 27, to personally vet every detail of the various accords to be announced next day and make sure all the terror groups had fully coordinated their ceasefire announcements. He also demanded to be shown the intelligence tip-offs Dahlan has begun to receive from the Americans and Israelis on coming terrorist action, on the principle that forewarned is forearmed.
In view of Arafat’s short- and long-term planning, the great effort invested by President Bush, Powell, Rice and the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers in the latest diplomatic breakthrough will have three immediate results:
A. Abbas’s prestige will take a nosedive which may well lead him into retirement.
B. The lifting of Israeli military pressure will grant Hamas in the Gaza Strip a chance to regroup and rearm, while Palestinian terrorist activity from the West Bank is sustained.
C. Yasser Arafat will enjoy a revival of prestige in the eyes of the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs having demonstrated by the Israeli withdrawal under pressure from Washington that the Americans, the Israelis, Abu Mazen. Dahlan are still dancing to his tune and that terrorism pays. If 33 months of violence brings such rich dividends, then why not go on until Israel is brought to total collapse? Thus far DEBKA-Net-Weekly No. 114
A recent opinion poll shows 73 percent Israeli support for the US-brokered accommodations reached with the Palestinians. This is not because the average Israeli does not understand what is going on but because he will do anything for a few days of calm and has given up hope of the Sharon government providing even a short break in the violence. The poll does not represent an optimistic view of the future but the despairing acceptance of the smallest respite in an anguished routine.
DEBKA
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God bless,
Kindgo
Inside the will of God there is no failure. Outside the will of God there is no success.
Posts: 4320 | From: Sunny Florida | Registered: Jun 2002
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Kindgo
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http://www.msnbc.com/news/801833.asp?0cv=CB10
Middle East breakthrough reported
Troops to leave Gaza; militants agree on 3-month cease-fire
NBC, MSNBC AND NEWS SERVICES
JERUSALEM, June 28 — Israel agreed to pull its troops back from the Gaza Strip and Bethlehem and suspend its attempts to assassinate militant leaders Friday after Palestinian militants confirmed that they would halt their attacks on Israelis for three months. The United States hailed the arrangement as a significant step forward for its “road map” to peace in the Middle East.
CONDOLEEZZA RICE, President Bush’s national security adviser, was expected to be in the region later in the day Saturday for talks with the Palestinian and Israeli prime ministers about the plan, which outlines steps toward ending violence and establishing a Palestinian state by 2005.
Her visit would coincide with an expected formal announcement by militant groups Sunday that they were ending attacks. The announcement would be a turning point in the 33 months of violence, although it remains to be seen whether all militants will comply.
Militants in Gaza said Friday that leaders of the two main Islamic militant groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, had accepted a temporary cease-fire negotiated with the Fatah movement aligned with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
“The trilateral document is now ready,” a senior militia leader told The Associated Press on the condition that neither he nor his group be identified.
Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, told Reuters that his group had informed Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas of its views, although he stopped short of declaring formal acceptance.
MIXED SIGNALS FROM ISRAEL
The militants’ agreement is with Fatah and Abbas. Israel has been cool to the idea of a “hudna,” or temporary truce, saying it would give time to militants spearheading the 33-month uprising for statehood to regroup. Responding to Hamas’ decision, a senior Israeli government source told Reuters that any truce signed by the militant group “is not worth the paper it’s written on.”
But shortly after Yassin signaled completion of the arrangement, state-owned Channel One television, monitored by NBC News, said Israeli troops could start withdrawing from the disputed area as early as Monday.
Under the arrangement, Israel would suspend its campaign to kill militant leaders and turn over responsibility for security in the disputed area to Mohammed Dahlan, the Palestinian Authority’s security minister.
Dahlan and Maj.-Gen. Amos Gilad, Israel’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, resolved the key sticking point, control over the main north-south road in Gaza, early Friday morning and concluded the deal later in the day, a Palestinian official said.
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on the terms of the withdrawal had been deadlocked for several weeks, in part over who would control the key road. Under Friday’s deal, the road will remain open 24 hours a day and the Rafah crossing into Gaza will be open 12 hours a day, Palestinian officials said.
‘SIGNIFICANT JOINT STEP’
The United States, sponsors of the troubled “road map” plan for peace, welcomed the news, which White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said was the “first significant joint step toward implementation of commitments made by each party.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell said in Washington, “We are pleased with the progress we have seen.”
U.S. officials said U.S. representatives who were already in Israel to monitor implementation of the road map would oversee the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Bethlehem.
A cease-fire by the militants is a key element for carrying out the road map plan.
The truce reportedly was worked out between Marwan Barghouti, the West Bank leader of Fatah, and leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Damascus, Syria. Barghouti is in an Israeli prison while on trial accused of complicity in Palestinian attacks that killed 26 Israelis.
Negotiators said the truce would halt attacks by the three groups for three months and would apply to the West Bank and Gaza as well as Israel, a key Israeli demand. In exchange, they demanded an end to killings of militants and military strikes and the release of prisoners; however, those were not made conditions for beginning the truce.
PEACE PLAN GATHERS MOMENTUM
Taken together, the Israeli pullback and the promise by Palestinian militants to halt attacks on Israelis for three months were seen as a major boost for Washington’s peace plan. Bush launched the initiative June 4, but implementation has been halting until now.
En route to the Middle East, Rice called on the European Union to outlaw the political wing of Hamas to dry up the flow of donations to the group, which has killed hundreds of Israelis in bombings and shootings.
Despite the apparent progress after days of negotiation, violence continued Friday as Israeli commandos raided the home of Omran al-Ghoul, a brother of a top Hamas bombmaker, Adnan al-Ghoul, in the village of Mujarkha in the central Gaza Strip.
A gunbattle erupted between soldiers and dozens of armed Palestinians. Omran al-Ghoul was killed, as were the bombmaker’s 19-year-old son, Mohammed, and an Israeli soldier. In a separate clash nearby, a bystander and another gunman were killed, Palestinian hospital officials said.
Palestinian witnesses said they heard 17 tank shells being shot during the battles and helicopters firing incessantly.
Adnan al-Ghoul, 42, also known as “the Engineer,” has overseen the construction of homemade Qassam rockets that have been fired at nearby Jewish settlements and Israeli border communities. He has been wanted for more than a decade by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel repeatedly has tried to kill him.
Thousands of Palestinians marched in a funeral procession for the four Palestinians who were killed and called for revenge. Some shouted out a warning for Abbas, who is also called Abu Mazen: “Abu Mazen, listen closely. There is nothing except resistance.”
Posts: 4320 | From: Sunny Florida | Registered: Jun 2002
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