Palestinian officials on Saturday denied Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres’ remarks that the Palestinians had rejected increasing the number of US monitors in the Occupied Territories.
The US is expected next week to present Israel and the Palestinians with a plan for sending a force of more American observers to the area. The observers would be made up of State Department and CIA personnel, said Haaretz.
“The allegations are baseless,” an official statement said, carried by the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA.
“The Palestinian leadership agrees with increasing the number of US troops in addition to increasing the number of other monitors from other countries to guarantee the brokered ceasefire and the implementation of the Mitchell report recommendations,” said the statement.
In an related development, Palestinian Minister of Planning Nabil Shaath, speaking Saturday in an interview on Palestinian Radio, said his administration opposed the deployment of ceasefire observers from the US alone, and instead proposed a mix including Europeans, Israel Radio reported, quoted by Haaretz.
Shaath said that an observer force had to provide real monitoring on events in the Occupied Territories and deter Israeli attacks.
Israel has maintained its opposition to international observers. However, following pressure from international leaders at the G8 summit held last week in Genoa, Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer suggested that Israel might be willing to accept a team of observers if it were comprised of Americans only.
A recent poll in Israel has shown that the Israelis support a monitoring force comprised of CIA officials, who are already involved in Palestinian-Israeli security talks.
The CIA has a long record of covert operations in developing countries, going back to the Phoenix Program in Vietnam in which many thousands were killed, and support for terrorists groups such as the Nicaraguan contras, who targeted health care workers and teachers in the 1980s – Albawaba.com
