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Palestinian Gunmen Ambush Israeli Van

Posted on: Friday, 12 December 2003, 06:00 CST

Palestinian gunmen ambushed a van of Israeli worshippers returning from a disputed holy site Friday morning, wounding seven passengers, as the Palestinian prime minister made an impassioned plea for new negotiations with Israel.

Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia's remarks, published in Israeli newspapers Friday, came amid increasing talk by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon about unilateral Israeli moves that would likely include a withdrawal from some areas of the West Bank and the annexation of others.

The two leaders have not met since Qureia was sworn in as prime minister in October, and efforts to arrange a summit between them in recent weeks have bogged down in disputes over Israeli restrictions on Palestinians and a security barrier Israel is building through the West Bank.

"We are dying to talk to you," Qureia said in an interview published Friday in the Maariv newspaper. "I believe that if we returned to the negotiating table, I could reach an agreement with Sharon."

In Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a boost to Israelis and Palestinians who favor a compromise peace deal by meeting with the author of one such private initiative, Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh. Nusseibeh's Israeli partner, former Shin Bet security chief Ami Ayalon, was delayed in New York.

Powell planned a meeting Friday with Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, fresh from meetings in Europe with the Egyptian president and Palestinian foreign minister, where renewed peace talks were high on the agenda.

Early Friday, Palestinians ambushed a vanload of Jews who had just visited Joseph's Tomb, a site inside Nablus, the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank. Israeli soldiers abandoned the site three years ago and Palestinians ransacked and burned it. The military has banned Israelis from entering the site.

Seven of the passengers were shot and wounded. The victims initially sought refuge in an abandoned house nearby, witnesses said. "I heard about 15 rounds," said a resident of the area, Morad Kassab, 27. "I looked from the window, and I saw strangers crying and screaming and talking on the phone." The army, which said it did not know the Jews were in the area before the attack, eventually evacuated them.

The Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, an armed group with loose ties to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, claimed responsibility. Al Aqsa gunmen drove the van into the nearby Balata refugee camp and burned it, witnesses said.

Some Jews believe that the biblical Joseph is buried at the site. Palestinians say it is the tomb of a sheik.

In the interviews published Friday, Qureia said time was running out for Israel and the Palestinians to reach a final peace agreement.

"We have no more time, we cannot have (anymore) interim agreements," he told the Maariv daily.

Vice Premier Ehud Olmert told The Associated Press he did not believe peace talks would succeed and proposed that Israel prepare to take unilateral action.

Under his plan, Israel would remove a "considerable" number of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and draw a border around the rest. Olmert suggested in the interview Thursday that Sharon gave tacit backing for his ideas.

Sharon told the National Religious Party, a patron of the settlement movement, that he did not think Israeli settlements would remain in Gaza as part of a final peace deal, participants in the meeting told Israeli newspapers. However, the Yediot Ahronot daily quoted Sharon aides as saying the 16 Gaza settlements would not be removed unilaterally.

The Palestinians fear any unilateral moves would leave them with much less land than they would get in a negotiated agreement.

Olmert's proposal falls far short of the Palestinian demand for a state in all of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, areas Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war. Israel will "definitely" not withdraw to the 1967 lines, and will keep "the united city of Jerusalem," Olmert said.

However, a removal of settlements would be a dramatic departure for Sharon, who has been the settler movement's leading patron for a quarter century.

Olmert said it is up to the Palestinians to decide whether they want to negotiate an agreement. "If they are unable to go ahead and unwilling to fight terror organizations, then there will be a unilateral, comprehensive step taken by the state of Israel and I think that may indeed change fundamentally the situation in the Middle East for a considerable amount of time," Olmert said.

Although rejecting a unilateral move that would leave the Palestinians with less land then they claim, Qureia said he welcomed Olmert's comments, new grassroots peace plans and the call by four former Israeli security chiefs for Israel to quickly reach a peace deal with the Palestinians.

"All these have created an atmosphere that promotes thinking of a solution to the conflict, not just gestures here and there," he told Yediot.

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