Abbas fails to win Hamas agreement to halt attacks on Israel

Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas failed to win agreement from Hamas militants on Wednesday to halt attacks on Israel, despite an Israeli concession made under U.S. pressure to help salvage a peace plan.

Security sources said Israel had agreed to curb its "track-and-kill" operations against Palestinian militants in a deal struck with U.S. officials seeking to prop up a peace "road map" imperiled by a recent wave of violence.

Militant Palestinian leaders dismissed the Israeli gesture as meaningless, underlining the difficulties U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell will face on a trouble-shooting mission to the region on Friday.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in a speech on Wednesday: "Moving forward (on the road map) requires a complete cessation of violence, terrorism and incitement."

Abbas held his first direct talks with the radical Islamic group Hamas since it broke off contacts with him after a U.S.-led June 4 summit, accusing him of being too conciliatory toward Israel.

Participants at the Gaza meeting said Abbas, a leading moderate, made progress in mending relations with Hamas leaders but made little headway in his effort to convince them to call a cease-fire with Israel.

After three hours of talks, senior Hamas official Ismail abu Shanab sounded a note of defiance, saying: "If there is (Israeli) occupation, there will be resistance."

Despite that, Hamas officials said they had agreed to further dialogue, though no date was set. They said they would continue internal discussions before presenting a formal response to Abbas, but gave no sign they were ready to budge.

After meeting Hamas, Abbas held direct talks with Islamic Jihad that ended with no apparent change in the militant group's refusal to end attacks.

On Tuesday night, Abbas held a meeting with the body that represents all 13 Palestinian factions in truce talks with the Palestinian Authority. Palestinian sources said that the meeting, which lasted for over three hours, dealt with the possibility of establishing a joint Palestinian leadership, a type of national unity government, which all the factions would be part of.

The proposal will again be discussed at a meeting Thursday. The sources added that, "the meetings were held in an atmosphere of agreement that a cease-fire would eventually be achieved."

Dr. Mohammed al-Hindi, one of the Islamic Jihad leaders in the Gaza Strip, who in the past had rejected any possibility of a cease-fire, said after the meeting that, "the issue of distancing civilians from the circle of violence is a principle that we were willing to consider in the past, but the more important issues are an Israeli withdrawal from the entire Gaza Strip and the evacuation of settlements there."

A side story

Rantisi: Failure to reach deal won't lead to civil war

By Amira Hass

GAZA CITY - There will be no Palestinian civil war, even if Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas fails to persuade Hamas to agree to a cease-fire, senior Hamas official Abdel Aziz Rantisi said in an interview with Haaretz yesterday. The full interview appears in this Friday's edition of Haaretz.

Senior officials in Abbas's Fatah party confirmed Rantisi's assessment, telling Haaretz that the Palestinian Authority's security services had no intention of making - as well as no ability to make - mass arrests of Hamas members as they did in 1996.

Speaking from his house in Gaza City's Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, Rantisi reiterated his movement's official position - that Hamas is studying the Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire. Other Hamas sources said that the organization would be willing to uphold a cease-fire, even if it was not formally declared. But the Hamas is expecting Abbas to show them Israeli guarantees Israel will halt its assassinations of wanted men. Other armed groups - including the armed wing of Fatah - suport the Hamas position on the issue.

However, it is not clear that even proponents of a cease-fire would go along with Abbas's demand that it apply in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as inside Israel.

Another senior Hamas official, Ismail Abu Shenab, who participated in the cease-fire talks with the Egyptians, gave Haaretz a summary of how his organization viewed the pros and cons of a truce. The advocates, he said, argued that this would enable the Palestinians to prove to the world that Israel under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was not interested in peace. They also say it would expose the U.S.-backed road map for Israeli-Palestinian talks as nothing more than a security arrangement, not a peace plan, he added.

Opponents argue that a cease-fire will enable Sharon to boast that Israel's army defeated Hamas. Additionally, they say, it will lead to an economic upswing in Israel.

Rantisi, in his interview, declined to relate to the details of the internal Hamas debate or to hint at what he viewed as its most likely outcome. Yet his answers did reflect some of the internal tension in his own stances.

For instance, he did not repudiate the statement he made last week, immediately after being wounded in an Israeli assassination attempt, that "the struggle will continue until the last Jew has left the country."

Asked how long he thinks this will take, he replied: "Dozens of years."

From a religious perspective, he explained, the Jews view this land as theirs, while Muslims view it as Muslim land that must be liberated.

But he then went on to say that these views constituted a "diagnosis" of the future sparked by current Israeli aggression, which, he said, "is pushing us over the edge, so that the Palestinians have nothing to lose."

And in the next breath, asked whether he was not pushing his people into a life of permanent misery and the constant threat of death, he replied: "No one can guarantee that Hamas will be able to bring about the land's liberation within 100 or 200 years. Without dramatic changes in the region, it will be impossible. We can't tell our people to continue in an unequal struggle. But we also can't tell them to give in."

This led him to a view that has hitherto been associated with those defined as the movement's "moderates": If Israel would withdraw from all the land it captured in 1967, dismantle all the settlements and enable an independent Palestinian state, "there will be an end to the struggle, in the form of a long-term truce."

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