Sharon vows more attacks on militants despite talks

PRIME MINISTER Ariel Sharon vowed yesterday, after an Israeli-Palestinian security meeting, to continue attacks on militants suspected of planning suicide bombings, a senior Israeli political source said.

With attention focused on a cycle of violence jeopardising the US-backed peace “road map,” Jewish settlers have quietly set up five new outposts in the occupied West Bank since Israel last week began dismantling such sites, a monitoring group said.

The United States has appealed for restraint from both sides after a week of bloodshed in which more than 50 people were killed. Israeli Major-General Amos Gilad and Palestinian security chief Mohammed Dahlan held talks late on Saturday.

However, there was no sign of a breakthrough after the meeting, which raised the possibility of an Israeli pullback in the northern Gaza Strip in exchange for a pledge by the Palestinian Authority to crack down on militants in the area.

“Israel will continue to act against targets defined as ‘ticking bombs’,” the political source quoted Mr Sharon as saying at his weekly cabinet meeting. “If Palestinians do not act against the terror infrastructure, Israel will do so.”

Last week’s violence included the killing of four soldiers in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus and seven Israeli helicopter strikes on militants, including an attempt to assassinate a Hamas leader, in which civilians also died.

US President George W Bush has sent the veteran diplomat John Wolf to the region to prevent the failure of the peace plan affirmed at a June 4 summit in Aqaba, Jordan, with Mr Sharon and Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas.

“Specifically, he will be coordinating, monitoring and promoting implementation of the road map...including the commitments made by Israeli and Palestinian leaders at the Aqaba summit,” the US Embassy in Tel Aviv said in a statement.

As part of the reciprocal steps charted by the road map, Israel last week began fulfilling a pledge that Mr Sharon made at the summit to dismantle settler outposts set up in the West Bank without government authorisation in the past two years.

Ten outposts were scrapped, but the Peace Now group, which monitors settlement on land Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war, said five new ones (only one of them inhabited) had since gone up.

In fresh violence yesterday in the northern Gaza Strip, Israeli soldiers shot dead a Palestinian militant affiliated with the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, linked to Palestinian president Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction.

Israel has criticised Mr Abbas and Mr Dahlan for preferring to negotiate a deal with militants on ceasing attacks on Israelis rather than carry out a crackdown mandated by the peace plan.

The road map calls for reciprocal steps to stop the bloodshed and envisages a Palestinian state by 2005.

Hamas, the main group behind a campaign of suicide bombings against Israelis, said it would reject any deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Meanwhile, Egyptian officials travelled to Gaza yesterday to try to coax Hamas into resuming talks with Mr Abbas.

And in the Gaza Strip, an eight-year-old girl, Amal Jarshoua, died of wounds suffered in an Israeli helicopter strike last week.