The main Palestinian militant groups have announced a temporary ceasefire and Israeli troops have begun pulling out of northern Gaza. The internationally backed "road map" for Middle East peace now stands a chance, though the truce is bound to be fragile
Weeks of painstaking negotiation by international mediators finally bore fruit over the weekend, when the main Palestinian militant groups agreed to call a hudna (ceasefire) and Israel agreed to start pulling its troops out of parts of the occupied territories. On Monday June 30th, police from the Palestinian Authority (PA) began moving into the northern Gaza strip, to take up positions vacated overnight by Israeli forces. Palestinian police have now assumed control of the town of Beit Hanoun and the Gaza strip's main north-south road. Israel has removed all of its checkpoints from the highway, except one near to an isolated Jewish settlement.
The next stage is to negotiate a similar security handover in the biblical city of Bethlehem in the West Bank. Then, if all goes well—that is, if the ceasefire holds and the Palestinian police succeed in curbing the militants' activities—Israeli sources say the West Bank town of Hebron might be next on the list for a negotiated handover, though the nearby Jewish settlement area would be excluded.
So it seems, for the moment at least, that the internationally backed "road map" towards Middle East peace is back on track after an outbreak of eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth attacks between Palestinian militants and Israeli troops that has left dozens dead and many more injured. President George Bush got Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, to shake hands on the peace plan on June 4th. However, just a few days later, gunmen from three of the main militant groups, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa Brigades, joined forces to make clear their opposition to the peace plan by attacking an Israeli army post, setting off the round of attacks and counter-attacks. The whole peace process would have been blown apart by the suicide bombings and other attacks against Israeli targets, and by Israel's retaliatory assassination attempts against Palestinian political leaders, were it not for the intense pressure that America, Egypt and other powers applied to both sides to make them stay at the negotiating table.
Though Hamas and Islamic Jihad have announced a three-month "suspension of military operations against the Zionist enemy", both in the occupied territories and in Israel, their spokesmen were at pains to insist that the ceasefire was entirely unconnected to the road map, which they continue to reject. They accuse Mr Abbas of a sell-out for failing to demand a complete Israeli pull-out from the occupied territories and for not insisting on the right of return for those Palestinians who fled the region when Israel was created in 1948.
The largest Palestinian party, Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement (of which Mr Abbas is a member), announced that it supported the truce, and a spokesman said that al-Aqsa Brigades—Fatah's military arm—would adhere to it. However, al-Aqsa is more diffuse and less disciplined than the other militant groups. Israeli forces believe some of its cells in fact take their orders from the Hizbullah guerrilla group in Lebanon or even from Iran. So al-Aqsa's fighters may present more of a threat to the ceasefire than their comrades in the more centralised Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Indeed, on Monday, al-Aqsa claimed responsibility for the killing of a foreign construction worker near the West Bank town of Jenin, the first fatality since the ceasefire was announced.
There were two main strands to the delicate negotiations that led to the ceasefire: while Egyptian mediators, and Mr Abbas, have had various rounds of talks with the militant groups, a stream of senior American officials have visited the region for talks with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders and their security chiefs. The latest of Mr Bush's officials to visit was his national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who spent the weekend shuttling between the Israeli and Palestinian governments, as the final details of the Israeli pullback and the truce were being settled.
For Palestinians in Gaza, the key test of whether the new agreement is working will be whether they can resume moving around freely, especially on the main north-south road. Though Israeli soldiers have dismantled most of their checkpoints, at one road junction near a Jewish settlement Israeli and Palestinian forces will be expected to co-operate, to halt Palestinian traffic when Israeli military or civilian vehicles drive through. The Israeli army will remain deployed in and around the Jewish settlements in Gaza.
Mr Bush declared last week that Hamas must be "dismantled" if peace was to have a chance. Israel, too, insists that the militant factions must be disarmed. It fears that, otherwise, the militants will simply use the truce period to regroup and prepare fresh attacks. And Israel says that if the PA's forces do not begin disarming the militants within three or four weeks, the agreement will collapse. But Mr Abbas fears that if his police tried forcibly to disarm the militants, this would trigger a civil war among the Palestinians.
But there are now signs that the Palestinian leadership is responding to demands to do more than just talking to the militants. One of Mr Abbas's ministers, Yasser Abed Rabbo, said over the weekend that the PA intended scrupulously to fulfil its commitments under the road map and ensure that only its security forces held sway in the occupied territories, as long as Israel kept its promises to stop assassinating Palestinian leaders, release Palestinian prisoners and freeze the construction of Jewish settlements. Israeli sources say that PA security officials have discreetly undertaken to begin confiscating illegal weapons in the weeks ahead. On June 28th, Mr Abbas presented Ms Rice with detailed evidence of recent operations by his police that had foiled attempted terrorist attacks by Hamas.
Despite these promising signs, many Israelis remain sceptical that the current truce will prove any more durable than past ones that have come and gone since the Palestinian intifada (uprising) began in 2000. Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, says it knows of dozens of active terrorist plots still afoot. Piece by piece, a security fence is being constructed, to separate Israel and the West Bank Jewish settlements from Palestinian areas.
Ms Rice took issue with Mr Sharon over this when they met in Jerusalem on Sunday. Primed with maps submitted to her by the Palestinians, she told the Israeli leader that the fence was biting out large chunks of the West Bank and in effect annexing them to Israel. The fence appeared to be unilaterally determining the future border between Israel and the independent Palestine that is the eventual goal of the road map, even though Israel contends that it is purely a security device without political significance. According to reports, Mr Sharon retorted that if the choice were between no fence and more terror victims, or a row with Washington, he would choose the latter. Clearly, though, the Israeli side was taken aback by America's forcefulness on this issue.
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