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Arafat Meets Mubarak As West Bank Clashes Persist
CAIRO, April 8 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak began talks here Sunday expected to focus on escalating Palestinian-Israeli violence.
Arafat, who arrived here Saturday, is presently meeting with Mubarak at the presidential palace in northern Cairo, sources at the palace said.
The two leaders are expected to hold talks on the "dangerous situation" in the Middle East, where Palestinians are faced with an "Israeli military escalation", Arafat's top aide Nabil Abu Rudeina earlier told reporters.
They are also due to discuss the results of Mubarak's talks with U.S. President George W. Bush during his April 2-5 visit to the United States.
Mubarak had urged the U.S. administration to take a more active role in bringing Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table, and in efforts to end the violence.
Arafat was here with a high-profile delegation including Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat, international cooperation minister Nabil Shaath and Abu Rudeina, Egypt's state-run news agency MENA said.
Meanwhile, Mubarak told Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in a telephone call that he would ask Arafat to work towards bringing calm and a re-launching of the peace process, Israeli army radio said Sunday.
Some 470 people, the vast majority Palestinians, have been killed since Israeli-Palestinian clashes erupted in late September.
Arafat's visit to Syria is expected in the "second half of this month," a PLO official said in an interview published by a Syrian government newspaper on Saturday.
The Syrian leadership and Arafat could agree during the visit on a "struggle program" based on "five principles," PLO political department head Faruq Qaddumi said.
Those principles are: "a total [Israeli] withdrawal from Palestinian lands occupied in 1967, the return of all the Palestinian refugees, the withdrawal of Israel from East Jerusalem, backing the Palestinian uprising and its continuation, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital," he said.
Qaddumi gave the interview during a stay in Damascus a few days ago to prepare for Arafat's trip, which will be his first official visit to Syria since 1996.
Also on Sunday, an Arab man suspected of assisting Israel was killed in the northern West Bank city of Tulkarem, witnesses said.
A previously unknown group called Unit 77, which purports to be part of the el-Asifa wing of Arafat's Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the killing in a statement to news agencies.
The victim, who was in his 40s and whose identity was not immediately available, lived with his family in Tulkarem and held an Israeli identity card, according to witnesses.
In January, the Palestinian Authority executed by firing squad two men for collaborating with Israel during the wave of deadly violence that has raged through the region since late September.
The executions were the first related to collaboration charges since Arafat's self-rule authority was established in 1994. In addition, another three Palestinians convicted of assisting Israel have been sentenced to death.
The Palestinians have accused collaborators of helping Israel eliminate activists suspected of orchestrating retaliatory attacks against Israel.
Palestinian officials have, however, discouraged vigilante killings, stating that all potential collaborators be tried in Authority courts.
Rashid Abu Shabak, deputy head of Palestinian preventive security in the Gaza Strip, told Al-Qods newspaper recently that more than 150 "Israeli agents" have been arrested since the beginning of the six-month-old Palestinian uprising.
Meanwhile, in a fresh outbreak of violence Sunday, Palestinians fired mortars at two Israeli military positions overnight, an army spokesman said, as violence was reported around the Palestinian territories.
Palestinians fired a shell on an army position at the Jewish settlement bloc Gush Katif in the southern Gaza Strip. They also launched two shells at a military post in the northern Gaza Strip by the Erez border crossing with Israel, the spokesman said.
The Israeli army said it also responded to Palestinian fire on two military camps near the Palestinian villages of Sanur and Zababida in the northern West Bank and on a military position near the Psagot settlement.
Separately, the army said a bomb was dismantled in the divided West Bank town of Hebron.
Tensions have been even higher than usual since late March, when a sniper, allegedly a Palestinian, shot dead a 10-month-old Jewish girl. Since then, settlers have rampaged on random Palestinian targets.
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