Barrier will kill peace, says Palestinian PM
Adding to pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a new opinion poll showed half of Israelis see him as untrustworthy as he considers a go-it-alone plan to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians on Israel's terms.
With the "road map" stymied by mutual mistrust, Sharon has said he may evacuate some isolated settlements and set borders along the barrier, in effect annexing occupied land where Palestinians seek statehood as envisioned by the "road map."
He says Palestinian failure to disarm militants behind suicide attacks is pushing him toward unilateral security steps.
Palestinians say Israel cannot achieve peace by hemming them in behind what they call a new "Berlin Wall". Sharon's plan-in-the-making has also drawn criticism from Washington.
"(The barrier) will kill the (peace) process. It will kill anyone who speaks of peace ... Now there is relative quiet. But the terror will start anew. The barrier can't prevent it," Qurie told Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest daily, in an interview.
Relative calm has prevailed for weeks. But in a pre-dawn flare-up yesterday, Palestinian gunmen wounded seven ultra-Orthodox Jews who defied Israeli military orders by praying at a shrine in the West Bank city of Nablus.
Israeli security sources said one of the Jews was critically wounded when gunmen fired at their vehicle near Joseph's Tomb, revered by Jews as the burial site of the biblical patriarch.
Israel says the barrier, a swathe of razor-wire fencing, walls and trenches, is meant to keep suicide bombers out of its cities and has already thwarted 20 such attacks in two months.
But the barrier often deviates from the border well into the West Bank to incorporate Jewish settlements.
"This is not how you achieve security. This is just a way to preserve the conflict. No one in the world will accept it," Qurie said.
Leaders of Sharon's right-wing Likud party said on Wednesday Sharon had outlined a "long-term redeployment" as an alternative to a peace deal and it was accepted by most of its legislators.
But a poll published in Maariv yesterday showed 50% of Israelis felt Sharon was unreliable, compared with 40% last August. Forty-seven percent see him as trustworthy now.
A Maariv poll published last week found that 55% of Israelis were not satisfied with Sharon's performance his poorest rating since his re-election in February.
The former general also increasingly suffers from perceptions by Israelis across the political spectrum that he has failed to come up with a realistic strategy for lasting peace, beyond tactics to keep the conflict on a low boil.
The new poll reported that 62% of Israelis believed Israel should evacuate most settlements for a permanent peace.
Tens of thousands of Hamas supporters, some of them masked, armed militants, rallied in two Gaza refugee camps yesterday to mark 16 years since the Muslim militant group's founding.
Vowing new suicide bombings in Israel, organisers shouted "Our fighters will continue to blow themselves up in the depths of the Zionist entity."
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