Sharon calls for ceasefire

Israelis and Palestinians were today waiting to see if eight months of violence would wind down after prime minister Ariel Sharon called for a ceasefire - but rejected a plea to halt building work on West Bank Jewish settlements.

At a televised news conference last night Sharon said: "I call tonight for a total truce in the area, and I say again here that if the Palestinians accept this proposal to stop the fire, we will immediately stop the fire."

But a senior Palestinian official said Sharon’s call was just part of the Israeli plan to continue occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Ahmed Abdel Rahman, an aide to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, said: "We reject everything Sharon said about a ceasefire."

In Washington White House spokesman Ari Fleischer welcomed Sharon’s call. He said it was "vital" that "the parties in the region unequivocally speak out and call for a cessation of the violence". Fleischer said US president George W Bush would "welcome a similar statement" from Arafat.

Following Sharon’s appeal, Israeli defence minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer ordered the Israeli army to stop all firing except "when life is in danger".

In a statement, Ben-Eliezer called on the Palestinians to "immediately stop violence and terrorism as a first step toward a return to the negotiating table" in keeping with the report of the commission, headed by ex-US senator George Mitchell. The report was published in New York on Monday.

However, Sharon rejected a key recommendation of the commission - a total freeze on construction in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

He said his government had agreed not to build new settlements, but allowed construction to meet the needs of the Israelis already living in the West Bank and Gaza.

Critics of Sharon’s settlement policy say there are already thousands of empty homes in the settlements.

By rejecting the construction freeze, Sharon was playing games with the commission report, said dovish parliamentary opposition leader Yossi Sarid.

"This is just a pose of accepting the Mitchell report while removing all its content," he told Israel television.

After meeting Arafat UN Middle East envoy Terje Larsen said an Israeli settlement freeze would be "one of the most important confidence-building measures" and it would help Arafat "cool down the situation".

Palestinian information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said the findings of the commission must be implemented as a package deal. He called for an international summit meeting to set up a "mechanism to implement the recommendations".

In his statement, referring to Sharon’s news conference remarks, Abed Rabbo did not mention Sharon’s call for a ceasefire.

Sharon said he accepted the Mitchell commission formula of a ceasefire, followed by a cooling-off period, confidence-building measures and finally, peace negotiations.

Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres said the Mitchell report should be adopted as it was, and negotiations should begin soon. "This should happen in the next few days. Otherwise the value of the report will dissipate," Peres said.

At the news conference, Sharon said that Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority was acting like a terror organisation. He said Israel "must relate to it as a terror group" until it stops planning and carrying out attacks against Israel.

But Abdel Rahman said Israel’s moves were designed to continue its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. "The Palestinian people’s response to the continuing aggression is to move forward with the intifada (uprising)," he said, "to defend themselves and to resist the occupation".