Palestinian President Yasser Arafat left for Cairo on Wednesday for a meeting of an Arab League committee set up last year to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Arafat is expected to brief the meeting on "the situation in the Palestinian territories, and the Israeli escalation and aggression," his top aide Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP.
The special committee was formed at an Arab League summit in October.
Violence has escalated sharply in recent days and Israel has sent in mass reinforcements to the West Bank.
According to Arabic press reports on Tuesday, the meeting is meant to head off an Israeli plan to eradicate the PA in a massive offensive.
A Western diplomatic report received by a Gulf state was quotes as saying that the US gave the go-ahead to Israel’s plan to use massive firepower to remove Arafat and his aides from the Occupied Territories.
The Lebanese Arabic daily An Nahar Arabic quoted the diplomatic report, allegedly authored in Washington, as saying the Israeli army was expected to follow the plan put forward by Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz as early as August 1.
An Nahar said that the information was leaked to a Gulf country, and that Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) foreign ministers subsequently called for the urgent meeting of the follow-up committee.
Although the daily did not name the Gulf state that received the report, other press reports pointed to Saudi Arabia, which called for an urgent GCC foreign ministers’ meeting last week. The call for the Arab Summit follow-up committee meeting emerged from that gathering.
An unnamed senior Lebanese official told An Nahar that the Cairo meeting would also focus on other actions by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, including ongoing assassinations of Intifada activists, settlement expansion, intransigence on the issue of the occupied Golan Heights, and plans to bar the return of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon to their homeland.
The official said that Lebanon had recently won the understanding of the US and the EU regarding the implementation of UN Resolution 194, which secures the right of return for all Palestinian refugees.
Up to 40,000 Palestinians could be killed or flee from their homeland if Israeli generals follow through on the Mofaz plan, according to the last issue of the British weekly Foreign Report by Jane's Information Group.
Last week, the Israeli press printed excerpts of the report by the group, one of the world’s most authoritative sources of information on military hardware and intelligence, along with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres’ dismissal of the of the article as “baseless…and fantasy.” – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
