EU to hold new Middle East talks; opposition to Sharon plan

EU to hold new Middle East talks
Friday April 16, 2004

Emergency talks on the Middle East peace process were today announced by the EU as further details of Israel's controversial "disengagement plan" emerged.
The latest proposals for a settlement, announced by the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, on Wednesday, would see Israel keeping parts of the West Bank that it captured in the 1967 war, and blocking the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

Aspects of the plan - which has been endorsed by the US but vehemently rejected by the Palestinians and other Arab states - appear to be in contravention of the existing "road map" peace plan, which was drawn up by a quartet consisting of the US, the EU, Russia and the UN last year.

Today, the row over Israel's unilateral announcement - which effectively saw the Palestinians sidelined while Mr Sharon courted US approval - looked set to escalate as new details of the plan emerged.

According to the Reuters news agency, which obtained a copy of the document, Israel intends to withdraw from Gaza by the end of 2005, but will reserve the right to strike at security threats emanating from the coastal enclave.

The plan also confirms earlier reports that Israel would keep military control of a narrow corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border.

The draft raised, for the first time, the possibility that Israel might expand the 100 metre (300ft)-wide border zone, where Israeli forces have uncovered numerous arms-smuggling tunnels used by Palestinian militants.

Other than naming a target date for completion of the pullout, the draft of the plan gave no timetable for Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which is home to 1.3 million Palestinians and 7,800 Jewish settlers.

However, the plan's language showed that Israel may not be ruling out a continuation of its policy of targeting militants in Gaza in army raids and helicopter missile strikes, as it has during three and a half years of conflict.

"The evacuation process is planned for completion by the end of 2005," the document stated. "Israel reserves for itself the basic right of self-defence, including taking preventative steps as well as responding by using force against threats that will emerge from the Gaza Strip."

Amid growing international concern over the future of the road map, the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, today said that a meeting of the quartet was likely to be held in Berlin around April 28.

However, speaking to reporters as he arrived for a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Ireland, Mr Solana insisted that the "road map", which envisages negotiations with the Palestinians, remained the basic framework for reaching a final settlement.

Mr Sharon still needs support from his rightwing Likud party - whose 200,000 members will vote on the plan in a binding referendum on May 2 - before he can forge ahead.

Opinion polls in mass-circulation dailies Maariv and Yedioth Ahronoth showed that Likud members were more likely to approve than oppose the pullout, which would mean uprooting around 20 settlements in Gaza and another four in the West Bank.