JERUSALEM — U.S. plans to penalize Israel for West Bank construction by deducting $289.5 million from a loan guarantee package will only cost Israel a few million dollars a year, a punishment Palestinians dismissed Wednesday as a cosmetic step with no effect on Israeli policy.
The deduction from $9 billion in loan guarantees promised over three years was intended to signal Washington’s disapproval of Israel’s settlement construction and plans to build part of a new security barrier deep inside the West Bank.
Meanwhile, violence surged Wednesday as Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip killed two Palestinians and wounded one. They apparently planned to set up an ambush on a road used by Jewish settlers, Israeli military sources said.
The soldiers spotted four men, at least two of them armed, heading after nightfall toward the Kissufim road, leading to the Gush Katif group of settlements in the southern Gaza Strip, the sources said. When the men saw the soldiers, two tried to flee in a waiting car. The soldiers opened fire, hitting at least three, the sources said. Troops were searching for the fourth man.
In Gaza, Israeli soldiers in a watch tower fired at a Palestinian neighborhood in the southern town of Rafah, killing a 9-year-old boy who was playing in front of his house, Palestinians said. Israeli military sources said they knew of no gunfire incidents in the area.
Also Wednesday, U.S. officials invited the Israeli and Palestinian organizers of an alternative peace plan to meet with Secretary of State Colin Powell, according to the plan’s coordinators.
Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh and former Israeli security chief Ami Ayalon will meet Powell Dec. 12 in Washington, said Dimitri Diliani, Nusseibeh’s spokesman.
The grass-roots peace plan calls for the creation of a Palestinian state in nearly all the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian refugees then would give up their demand to return to homes lost in Israel during the 1948 Mideast war.
The backers of another unofficial plan, the so-called Geneva Accord, which envisions peace along similar lines, also expect to meet with Powell next month, although no date has been set, said Yossi Beilin, chief Israeli negotiator of the plan.
That accord gives Palestinians a state and could divide part of Jerusalem with a bulletproof glass wall, but keeps most refugees out of Israel.
Copyright ©2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
