Israeli ire turns inward
2005-02-14 12:51
Jerusalem - Israel's Cabinet discussed the increasing threats against its leaders by Jewish opponents of a plan to pull out of the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank, at the same time as it approved freedom for 500 Palestinian prisoners as a step toward defusing four years of violence.
The twin developments on Sunday showed that just as Israeli-Palestinian fighting winds down in the wake of a truce declared at a summit meeting last Tuesday, internal Israeli tensions are escalating into warnings of political assassinations.
With the truce holding, the military pledged that bodies of 15 Palestinians killed last year during attacks on Israeli settlements and army bases in the Gaza Strip would be handed over to Palestinian authorities in Gaza for burial.
The Israeli ambulance service called the move "a humanitarian gesture".
Senior commanders from both sides met late on Sunday to coordinate the handover of Jericho, the first of five West Bank towns to be turned over to Palestinian control. Army Radio reported that the handover would take place in about 48 hours.
In an upbeat interview to be published in Monday's edition of The New York Times, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said the war with the Israelis is effectively over and that Sharon is speaking "a different language".
Abbas spoke proudly of persuading the radical groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad to respect the truce he and Sharon announced last Tuesday at their first meeting, in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, the highest-level meeting between Israelis and Palestinians in four years.
"Today our comrades in Hamas and Jihad said they are committed to the truce, the cooling down of the whole situation, and I believe we will start a new era," Abbas told the newspaper.
However, Israel's Cabinet was distracted from peace moves by internal threats, as it heads toward dismantling long-established settlements in the occupied territories for the first time. Sharon's disengagement plan calls for Israel to evacuate all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four small communities in the West Bank this year.
In 1995, an extremist opponent of peace concessions assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Now some Cabinet ministers are receiving abusive letters from Jewish extremists, and one of the recipients, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the infrastructure minister, warned the Cabinet: "I am telling you: They will try to kill the prime minister."
Sharon instructed law enforcement agencies to report back to the Cabinet with steps to "rein in the violent rampage" of extremists who oppose his pullout plan.
Extremists also have put up posters across the country with implicit death threats to Sharon. The posters say that Rabin and Sharon's wife Lily, who is deceased, are "waiting for Sharon."
Also at Sunday's meeting, the Cabinet approved the release of 500 Palestinian prisoners who were not involved in violence against Israelis, and who have completed two-thirds of their sentences.
- AP