Agence France-Presse,
RAMALLAH, West Bank: Dozens of wanted Palestinian militants have made a rare pledge to halt anti-Israel attacks in a deal aimed at bolstering moderate president Mahmud Abbas in his battle for authority with Hamas, officials said on Sunday.
The pledge, part of a deal in which Israel offered an effective amnesty to the gunmen, was unveiled a day before Abbas is due to meet Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
In another move to strengthen Abbas, a US official said on Sunday that President George W. Bush was expected to outline new financial and diplomatic support for the beleaguered Palestinian government.
It came after Israel authorised veteran Palestinian nationalist Nayef Hawatmeh, head of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), to visit the occupied West Bank for the first time in 40 years, an Israeli security official told AFP.
Israel handed the Palestinians a list of 189 militants, most from Abbas's secular Fatah party, saying it would take them off its wanted list if they pledged to stop activities against the Jewish state.
“All of the 189 people included on the list handed in by Israel” have signed, a senior Palestinian security official said.
Israel has said that if the men hand in their weapons, respect their promise for three months, and not leave West Bank areas under exclusive control of the Palestinian Authority, their names will be erased from the list of wanted men.
Included on the list was Zakaria Zubeidi, leader of the Fatah offshoot militant group the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the northern West Bank town of Jenin and among the most sought-after militants, officials on both sides said.
Zubeidi told AFP that all Al-Aqsa militants on the list “have signed a pledge to stop their attacks against Israel. The Al-Aqsa Brigades will not be an obstacle to any political project to solve the Palestinian question in a just manner.”
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri slammed the deal, telling AFP in Gaza that “it is aimed at weakening the resistance.”
The effective amnesty is the latest gesture by Israel to strengthen the moderate Abbas after forces loyal to him were overrun in Gaza exactly a month ago by fighters from the Islamist Hamas movement, whose charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.
“We are in 2007 and we have to ask ourselves what serves the interests of Israel and how to prevent Hamas from taking control” in the occupied West Bank, Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai told army radio.
“There are no other ways of helping Mahmud Abbas except to allow modifications in the list of wanted Palestinians,” he said.
Authorising Hawatmeh to enter the Palestinian territories for the first time since the land was captured by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War is another major Abbas-bolstering measure.
Hawatmeh is due to attend a summit of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, an umbrella group of several Palestinian movements, which is expected to discuss preparations for a general election.
Abbas and Olmert are due to meet on Monday in Jerusalem instead of the West Bank town of Jericho as previously reported, an Israeli official told AFP.
A senior Palestinian official said that the meeting was “most likely” to take place on Monday, but that the Palestinian side was still awaiting answers to several queries that they made of Israelis and would not consider the meeting as going ahead until they received them.
During the last meeting between Abbas and Olmert on June 25 at a four-way summit in Egypt, Israel announced it was releasing some Palestinian custom duties that it had withheld for more than a year after Hamas came to power.
Around 118 million dollars have since been paid out, allowing Abbas's emergency government led by prime minister Salam Fayyad to pay full monthly salaries to civil servants for the first time in more than 12 months.
The government has also agreed to free 250 Palestinian prisoners, mostly members of Abbas's Fatah movement, out of the more than 11,000 Palestinians currently held in Israel. The list of those names is due to be finalised in the coming days.
