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Zinni Meets with Arafat, Envoy Continues Peace Mission
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Dec. 10 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - U.S. special peace envoy Anthony C. Zinni met here Monday with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat in the West Bank city of Ramallah in a continued attempt to reach a ceasefire agreement with Israel.
The meetings comes a day after reports that the retired Marine Corps general reportedly threatened to return to Washington if the Palestinian Authority and Israel failed to make substantial progress towards an agreement to cease violence within 48 hours.
Zinni met Arafat and Palestinian security chief Jubril Rajoub at the Palestinian leaders' West Bank headquarters just hours after two Palestinian children, ages three and 13, were killed in another Israeli assassination attempt on a Palestinian leader, Mohamed Sidr of the Palestinian resistance group Islamic Jihad.
Israel has assassinated around 70 Palestinian political leaders and figures and killed over 800 Palestinian civilians in the past 15 months since the start of the current Intifada against Israeli occupation.
"President Arafat asked Zinni to put pressure on Israel to stop its assassinations, its military escalation and to lift the blockade on Palestinian territories," Nabil Abu Rudeina said.
A top advisor to Arafat told Agence France-Presse the Palestinian leader asked Zinni to put pressure on Israel to halt its military escalation in the Palestinian territories. Arafat also pledged that he was determined to cooperate with the Zinni on his two-week mission to secure an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire.
Earlier Monday, hardline Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon met with Zinni in West Jerusalem to try to convince him to stay on and help both sides find an agreement, the prime minister's office said.
Sharon said he would do all he could to allow Zinni to succeed in quelling the current conflagration in the conflict, acknowledging the importance of Zinni's role in the region.
Palestinian information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo branded Sharon a "child killer" Monday after Israeli helicopters killed the two Palestinian children in the failed hit on Sidr, an anti-occupation activist.
"Ariel Sharon is a child killer who does not respect the sanctity of life. Targeting civilian cars in a crowded Hebron market, thus exposing tens of civilians to grave danger, is outrageous and condemnable," he said in a statement.
Abed Rabbo said the Palestinian Authority, blamed by Sharon for not cracking down on bombers, would hold the prime minister "personally responsible for this horrific crime," as well as for its repercussions.
"The Israeli public should be aware that the Israeli prime minister is also personally and directly responsible for any drop of Palestinian or Israeli blood that might be shed following this immoral act," he added.
The Palestinian minister once again called for the international community and the United Nations Security Council to take steps to protect the Palestinians from renewed Israel military attacks and a tightening of the military occupation in the West Bank, Occupied East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
Yossi Sarid, head of Israel's left-wing opposition, Meretz, also condemned the al-Khalil (Hebron) attack. "The killing of children with helicopter missiles is not more legitimate than the killings by terrorists," he said.
The Palestine Monitor, a non-governmental Palestinian media clearing house, said Israel's controversial policy of tracking down and "liquidating" Palestinian resistance leaders had so far killed 79 Palestinians, of whom 26 were bystanders.
Meanwhile, a seven-year-old Israeli girl also was slightly injured when mortar bombs landed in the Jewish settlement bloc of Gush Katif in the southern Palestinian territories in the Gaza Strip, an Israeli army spokeswoman said.
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