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Israeli Soldiers Killed In Gaza
JERUSALEM, June 22 (News Agencies) - The already shaky truce between Israel and the Palestinians took a further knock Friday with the deaths of two Israeli soldiers and a Palestinian bomber in the Gaza Strip.
It was the first bomb attack since the start of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire on June 13th.
Word of the deaths came as EU diplomats met with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon Friday in a race against time to stop the ceasefire from breaking down completely.
The Ezzedin al-Qassam brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, claimed responsibility for the attack.
In a statement released in Gaza City, the group said "the martyr Ismail Beshir Moassowabi, 27, from the al-Shati refugee camp," carried out the operation.
The statement, including a photo of the bomber, said the group would continue its operations until the "the end of the Israeli occupation."
Meanwhile, Sharon's government came under increasing pressure from Jewish settlers in the West Bank to crack down on Palestinians following the death of three settlers in shooting incidents since Monday.
Some 50 settlers gathered outside his office as he began talks with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Middle East envoy Miguel Angel Moratinos.
They shouted "we do not want to be the next ones on the list" and "the policy of restraint is killing us," referring to attacks on them by Palestinians.
After his meeting with Sharon, Solana met Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who assured him he would do his utmost to apply the ceasefire with the Israelis, according to a Palestinian official.
Arafat said he was "making maximum efforts to fulfill all [Palestinian] obligations," chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat told the press after a meeting in the West Bank town of Ramallah between Arafat and Solana.
Solana said he hoped the meeting would help move along the application of the Tenet agreement, establishing a ceasefire, and the Mitchell report.
Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who spoke with Solana earlier, said Arafat's "instructions... for an end to violence should be clear; until now, no preventive operation has taken place to stop terrorists from carrying explosives."
Sharon is to meet in Washington Tuesday with U.S. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is heading for the region later next week.
Meanwhile, a senior Palestinian official renewed appeals to the United States to back the deployment of a neutral observer force in the Middle East to monitor a ceasefire with Israel.
In a meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell ahead of his trip to the region next week, Palestinian minister for international cooperation Nabil Shaath also called for quick moves to restart peace talks after cementing the fragile truce and taking confidence-building measures.
"I talked about the necessity of producing some sort of third-party monitoring on the ground in order to really stop escalations, prevent flare-ups at the moment they start and [give] information to the parties," Shaath said.
"We know there will be incidents," he said, maintaining it would be impossible to simultaneously halt all the violence after nine months of the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, and Israeli reprisals.
"It is absolutely impossible to stop everything at the same time, but the best effort is what we are seeking and it is the best effort we are giving in order to move on," Shaath told reporters after meeting Powell.
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