Israel will not achieve security by re-occupying Palestinian cities, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher warned Saturday.
Israel's re-occupation of West Bank cities is "illegal, unjustified and contrary to agreements" signed with the Palestinians, Maher told reporters.
He reminded Israel that "past invasions did not bring about security and persevering on the same path will not change the result."
The minister also slammed an Israeli tank shelling of a market in the West Bank town of Jenin on Friday, which killed four people, all but one of them children, according to Palestinian medical sources.
"It cannot be a mistake, it is a premeditated aggression on civilians," he said. The Israeli army has admitted its tanks had wrongly opened fire and Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer apologized for the shelling, AFP reported.
Maher on the other hand described as "important" French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin's Middle East tour, to start Sunday in Cairo with talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
He added that Villepin's trip comes after the European Union leaders ended Saturday their summit in Seville, Spain, with a call for a quick return to peace talks in the Middle East and the establishment of a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders, a vision in line with the Arab stance.
Meanwhile, President Mubarak on Saturday discussed by the phone the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with Jordanian King Abdullah II and Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi, the official MENA news agency reported.
In addition, Mubarak and Kadhafi discussed the next summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) scheduled for July 8-10 in the South African city of Durban, it said.
That summit will mark the end of nearly four decades of existence of the OAU, which is being replaced by the 53-member African Union, the brainchild of Kadhafi and loosely based on the European Union. (Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
