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Palestinians Slam Israeli Withdrawal as a "Swindle"
GAZA CITY, Nov. 27 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The secretary of the Palestinian cabinet, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, on Tuesday denounced the Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank town of Jenin as a "swindle" designed to curry favor with a visiting U.S. peace delegation.
"This is a swindle. This is not a withdrawal, it's a redeployment, because Israeli forces are still surrounding Jenin," said Abdel Rahman, after the Israeli army said it had completed its withdrawal from the northern West Bank town, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
"There are still checkpoints and tanks, there are still assassinations, entries into Palestinian villages and cities," added Abdel Rahman. "Nothing has changed on the ground in the daily life of the Palestinians."
"They did it because of the international pressure on Israel to withdraw" from Palestinian land, he said, referring to U.S.-led calls for Israel to leave so-called Area A zones, which are deemed to be under full Palestinian control.
The Israeli press said the redeployment was a goodwill gesture at the start of the U.S. peace mission.
Gideon Meir, spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said the withdrawal was a gesture of goodwill as the talks with the U.S. envoys have begun, reported BBC's online news service.
An Israeli army spokesman said earlier that the troops "deployed during the night to positions from where they can continue to protect the safety of the Israelis."
Palestinian security officials confirmed the Israelis were no longer on the hill in southern Jenin they had been re-occupying in the Palestinian-controlled land known under peace accords as "Area A". They said they had not been spotted there for the last week, but had been unable to confirm their departure.
Abdel Rahman said the uncertainty of when the Israelis had actually withdrawn, and to where, underscored Palestinian calls for international observers to keep tabs on the 14-month crisis, something Israel has refused to contemplate.
In another development, two Palestinians sprayed a crowd with rifle fire in the northern Israeli town of Afula Tuesday, injuring nine Israelis before being shot dead themselves by police and soldiers, AFP reported.
Four of the injured were in a serious condition, ambulance services said.
The Israeli security forces were not ruling out that a third Palestinian man had escaped the scene of the attack, between a busy market and a bus station.
The attack coincided with a meeting between hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State William Burns and retired General Anthony Zinni, sent by Washington in what the U.S. has called a new peace drive.
Sharon has said he regards the Zinni mission to achieve a cease-fire as of "supreme importance."
However, his selection of a negotiating team headed by former Major General Meir Dagan, is a clear message to Zinni that Sharon believes his mission should concern itself only with pressuring Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to jail opposition activists, reported
Ha'aretz Israeli Daily newspaper.
And in Damascus, an official Syrian daily newspaper said Tuesday the U.S. diplomatic mission to the Middle East to each a ceasefire between the Israelis and Palestinians is doomed to failure because of Israel's intransigence.
Israel "refuses to freeze settlements, refuses to withdraw [from Arab land occupied in 1967] and wants to maintain Jerusalem as the unified capital of its racist entity," charged the newspaper of the ruling Baath party.
"This stance condemns the American mission to failure," al-Baath commented Tuesday. The paper also took issue with Washington, saying that "The Middle East policy of President George W. Bush's administration remains unbalanced [because] it persists in considering the Palestinian Intifada [Uprising] simply as violence."
The United States "refuses the right of the Palestinian people to resist occupation and justifies Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people as legitimate defense," the paper added.
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