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Palestine Blames Israel for Mideast Violence
RAMALLAH, West Bank, June 9 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A top Palestinian security official described Saturday a meeting with Israeli counterparts and United States CIA chief George Tenet the previous evening as "very tense" but put the onus on Israel to guarantee a return to calm in the region.
"The Palestinian position was and still is that stability will not be achieved without an end to the Israeli aggression and an end to the closure and the release of (Palestinian) detainees," the Palestinian head of preventive security for the West Bank, Jibril Rajub, said on Voice of Palestine radio, the French news agency AFP reported.
"The ball is now in the Israeli court," he said, adding that security meetings would continue in parallel with political meetings to firm up a fragile ceasefire and move ahead to peace negotiations.
The meeting between top Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs Friday evening took place in the presence of CIA chief George Tenet on a mission to boost the truce declared by both sides.
The U.S. Middle East envoy, William Burns, had talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
Palestinian officials said the security chiefs would meet again Sunday to give their answers to propositions on ways out of more than eight months of violence offered by the three sides during Friday's meeting.
Tenet, who is on a regional tour aimed at bolstering the fragile Palestinian-Israeli ceasefire, began talks in Cairo Saturday with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, sources at the presidential palace said.
The Palestinian resistance group Hamas led West Bank protests against U.S. diplomatic efforts, burning an effigy of Tenet at a rally in Nablus and an American flag at a demonstration in Ramallah, the scene of the Tenet meeting, the BBC online service reported.
Hamas has accused the CIA chief of trying to divide the Palestinians, and has vowed to continue attacks against Israeli targets.
The Americans are pushing both sides to maintain a ceasefire and implement confidence-building measures as recommended by the Mitchell report. The Israelis on Thursday gave Tenet a list of several dozen suspected Palestinian activists Israel wants the Palestinian authorities to arrest.
However, Palestinian international cooperation minister Nabil Shaath told reporters that Israel's demand that it arrest a swathe of around 300 activists was "irrational" and "unproductive."
Shaath said "people will not be arrested unless we [Palestinian Authority] have real information - hard information - that some people are preparing something, in other words as a pre-emptive [measure] and not just a punitive [action]."
Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has announced that he is going to the Middle East early next week to urge the Israelis and Palestinians not to let what he called "terrorists" determine the course of peace efforts, the BBC reported.
Annan said he had been in almost daily contact with top U.S., EU and Russian diplomats about the situation in the Middle East.
Despite international peace efforts, sporadic violence continued in the region with at least 16 Palestinians wounded by Israeli gunfire on Saturday after crowds briefly succeeded in opening the road between Ramallah and the university town of Bir Zeit, closed by the Israeli occupation force for a week, witnesses said.
The occupation forces arrested the head of the Palestinian Bir Zeit University's student union, before dawn on Saturday, family members told the Palestinian news agency Quds Press.
Bashar Hajjeh, 23, an economics student at the university, was arrested at his home in the West Bank village of Burqa east of Ramallah at around 2300 GMT by Israeli forces.
The Israelis gave no reason for his arrest, but the family said Hajjeh was a member of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas whose armed wing has carried out numerous attacks against the Israeli occupation of Muslim and Arab land.
This ongoing wave of violence erupted on September 28 when Sharon provocatively intruded on the Muslim holy site of Al-Aqsa mosque.
Israeli occupation forces have reacted violently to the Palestinian protests and used U.S.-made sophisticated weapons to quell the uprising. Palestinian officials say 547 Palestinians have so far been killed - 199 in Gaza, 285 in the West Bank and 63 others not registered because of the Israeli siege - and 25,258 have been injured.
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