Palestinian President Yasser Arafat on Monday sought Saudi support for an Arab mini-summit on the Palestinian crisis as Israel targeted a Hamas activist in the West Bank in a failed assassination attempt, said reports.
An Arab diplomatic source posted in Saudi Arabia said the Palestinians were proposing a mini-summit "on the explosive situation in the Palestinian territories and the Israeli escalation against the Palestinian people."
"This question will be raised in talks which Mr. Arafat will have with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdelaziz on Monday," the source told AFP, asking not to be named.
He gave no details of who would take part in a restricted summit.
Arafat flew in to the Red Sea city of Jeddah and met Saudi King Fahd to discuss the latest developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the official Saudi news agency, SPA, reported.
The Palestinian ambassador to Riyadh said they also held talks on "the means to pressure the United States to implement the decision of the G8 summit" backing the deployment of observers in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Arafat praised Saudi support for the Palestinians and "the refusal of Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdelaziz to visit the United States in protest at the US alignment with Israel," said Mustafa Dib, who took part in the talks.
The Palestinian leader arrived from the Jordanian capital with International Cooperation Minister Nabil Shaath and chief peace negotiator Saeb Erakat in his delegation.
In Amman, King Abdullah and Arafat stressed the need for international observers to be sent to the Palestinian territories.
The Palestinian ambassador in Amman, Omar Khatib, said before the meeting with the Jordanian monarch that Arafat was seeking support for an extraordinary Arab summit.
After Saudi Arabia, Arafat is to travel on to the United Arab Emirates on Monday, according to the ambassador in Riyadh.
Meanwhile, Israeli helicopters fired missiles at the home of Hamas activist Ibrahim Jabri, in a failed assassination attempt.
No injuries were reported, said Haaretz newspaper, adding that the Israeli army had not yet acknowledged the incident.
ISRAEL WON'T BLOCK CIA ROLE IN TRUCE MONITORING
Israel has informed the US administration that it will not oppose expanding the CIA-directed mechanism so that it would be easier to oversee any violations of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, said Haaretz.
The announcement was made Sunday by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.
"We have no problem with American involvement, and there are parameters in which we can live with American involvement in furthering the process [of resolving the confrontation with the Palestinians]," diplomatic sources in Jerusalem said.
"There will surely be discussions on the matter between us and them," they added.
The same sources said that Israel would request that the United States defined the mandate of its involvement.
During the last meeting of the Supreme Security Committee, which is overseeing the implementation of the agreements brokered by CIA Director George Tenet in June, the representatives of the US intelligence organization expressed their disappointment with the current functioning of the monitoring mechanism.
According to Israeli security sources, during the last meeting of the committee, the US representatives expressed the need for an alternative to the existing mechanism.
According to the paper, the Americans complained that the current framework had not yielded any real results and had not managed to enforce the ceasefire.
The mechanism in place is headed by the CIA representative in Tel Aviv who chairs a tripartite meeting of US, Israeli and Palestinian security officials every Wednesday. The present arrangement was reached at the Wye conference in 1998.
According to some Israeli sources, the US proposal for expanding the CIA role in the monitoring operation was raised during a meeting between Peres and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak last Sunday, with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon giving his nod to the suggestion.
Sources at Sharon’s office, however, reject this version of events, the paper added.
They added that Sharon demanded "in-depth clarification" with the US before deciding on a proposal to expand the CIA observer delegation.
ISRAELIS, PALESTINIANS HOLD SECURITY MEETING OVER RAFAH CROSSING
Palestinians and Israelis met late Sunday to seek a solution to the problem of hundreds of Palestinians stuck at the Rafah crossing point between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian source said.
"The two parties agreed to send Palestinian and Israeli teams to look for solutions to the problem of Palestinian passage at Rafah," the head of public security in Gaza said in a statement, cited by AFP.
More than 1,500 Palestinians have been blocked at Rafah for more than a day by slow Israeli border checks.
Rafah is divided into two parts. One half is in Egypt, the other is in Palestinian territory, but Israel controls the crossing terminal.
Since the September 2000 eruption of the latest Palestinian uprising against 34 years of Israeli military occupation, the media has reported that Palestinians have killed at least 125 Israelis with weapons ranging from stones and knives to machineguns and car bombs. Israeli military sources have reported well over 600 injuries to Israelis of Jewish descent.
In the same time period, according to the UK newspaper The Guardian, Israeli soldiers and armed Jewish settlers have killed 13 Arab Israelis and 510 Palestinians with weapons ranging from machineguns and tanks to US-made Apache helicopter gunships and F-16s.
According to an Amnesty International report, nearly 100 of the Palestinians killed were children. In addition, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society has reported over 14,000 Palestinians wounded.
Jewish author Noam Chomsky, who according to a New York Times Book Review article is “arguably the most important intellectual alive,” has been quoted as saying: “State terrorism is an extreme form of terrorism, generally much worse than individual terrorism because it has the resources of a state behind it.” - Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
