Peres says Abbas govt 'on right track'

Israeli deputy prime minister Shimon Peres said today the Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas is on the right track, despite last week’s Tel Aviv suicide bombing and other attempts by Palestinian militants to torpedo a fragile truce.

Peres met Palestinian Cabinet minister Mohammed Dahlan last night in Tel Aviv for talks on economic issues, the first high-level meeting between the sides since the nightclub bombing which killed five Israelis last Friday.

“There is a change, a deep change and some of the things the Palestinians have done are worthy of praise,” Peres told Israel Army Radio, giving as one example the deployment of Palestinian police in the Gaza Strip to prevent the firing of locally made Qassam rockets at Israeli targets.

“There is relative calm. Certainly there are people trying to destroy peace efforts - that doesn’t surprise me,” he said.

The army said Palestinians set off a car bomb overnight next to a Jewish tomb where Israelis were praying in the West Bank city of Nablus, but nobody was injured.

Peres said he discussed with Dahlan the possibility of Israel handing over 1,000 acres of greenhouses in Gaza settlements to the Palestinians after its planned withdrawal in the summer, but the Palestinians were still considering their position.

Yonatan Bassi, the senior Israeli official overseeing the withdrawal, said yesterday that peppers and tomatoes grown in the greenhouses could help feed the 1.3 million Palestinians packed into the narrow coastal strip. Luxury items such as flowers and strawberries would be exported, mainly to the European Union.

“Israel is negotiating now with America and with others, with the international community, to leave all the infrastructure of the greenhouses to the Palestinians through a third party,” Bassi said, without giving further details.

A study published last year by the United Nations and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) said seven out of 10 Palestinians were living on insufficient food, and the United Nations put unemployment in Gaza at more than 22%.

A USAID official in Tel Aviv said 3,000 Palestinians were currently working in settlement greenhouses, and turning them over to Palestinian ownership could create a further 7,000 jobs.

With each Gaza labourer supporting eight other people, that could help 63,000 people.

Bassi also said all the residents of the largest Gaza settlement, Neve Dekalim, could move to Nitzan, a failed community between Ashdod and Ashkelon on Israel’s southern coastline. A contractor who started building the community ran into liquidity problems. Bassi said the state could buy it back and offer it to the settlers. About 2,600 of Gaza’s 8,500 settlers live in Neve Dekalim.

Bassi said most of the Gaza settlers would accept compensation and leave voluntarily.

However, settler leaders charged that Bassi is engagig in psychological warfare. They insist that most of the settlers will resist evacuation.

“He’s frustrated that nobody is going to him, nobody’s signing up” for compensation or alternate housing, Gaza Coast Regional Council head Moshe Shimoni told Israel Radio. “There’s no truth in what he said. The man is simply lying.”

The Israeli military, meanwhile, dropped a plan to build a wide, deep moat along the Gaza-Egypt border to stop Palestinian arms smuggling through tunnels, military officials said yesterday.

The search for the tunnels among the Israel-controlled border has set off hundreds of firefights during four years of violence. Israel keeps widening the road to make it harder to tunnel under it, destroying buildings where the tunnels originate, but new ones keep appearing.

Israel had initially planned to block the tunnels by building an 80ft-deep, three mile-long, sea water-filled trench, which would have required it to demolish 200 to 3,000 Palestinian homes in the already battered Rafah refugee camp.

The army determined that Attorney General Meni Mazuz would reject the plan and has come up with a less invasive design, the officials said. The new barrier would consist of a complex of 25-foot concrete walls, an underground concrete barrier, fences and technologies to detect underground digging.

Since Abbas took office in January, he has deployed Palestinian police throughout Gaza and instructed them to stop the arms smuggling. Palestinian security has reported finding and plugging eight tunnels.