World

Israel Withdrawing From West Bank

March 21, 2000 / 7:28 AM EST / AP

Israel began withdrawing troops from 6.1 percent of the West Bank on Tuesday as part of a land-for-security deal that would give the Palestinians control over 41 percent of the disputed territory.

At this army base near the West Bank city of Ramallah, Israeli army officers shook hands with Palestinian security officers in a ceremony marking the land transfer. Similar ceremonies were to take place near the West Bank cities of Hebron and Nablus.

Israeli officials gave the Palestinians five copies of the maps outlining the area being transferred. Soldiers placed rocks marking the new boundary, and Palestinian security officials waited at a nearby gas station, ready to enter the area.

The transfer gives the Palestinians populated swaths of land bordering cities almost entirely under Palestinian control, giving Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat more of the contiguity he needs for a state.

In 5.1 percent of the West Bank being transferred, the Palestinians were already in charge of civilian institutions but were also being given security control. The rest of the West Bank was going from full Israeli control to full Palestinian control.

The Palestinians had demanded suburbs of Jerusalem, claimed by both sides as their capital, but settled on the villages after five weeks of deadlock. Many of the areas to be handed over are near but do not border Jerusalem.

The withdrawal came just hours after two shootings Monday night killed a Palestinian woman and injured her husband and three Israelis.

The Israelis were injured, one of them seriously, after gunmen in a car opened fire on them as they were delivering holiday baskets for the Jewish festival of Purim to soldiers near Hebron. Israeli soldiers set up roadblocks following the attack, and later opened fire on a Palestinian car, killing the woman and seriously injuring her husband.

The Israeli army said in a statement Tuesday that the soldiers opened fire after the vehicle's driver tried to run over one of the soldiers at the checkpoint.

Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority were on high security alert for Tuesday's arrival of Pope John Paul II for a historic six-day Holy Land pilgrimage.

The redeployment completes a three-part phase in a series of land transfers under interim peace accords. The peace process, which started with a general agreement negotiated in secret in Oslo, Norway, in 1993, envisioned a series of confidence-building handovers of territory to Palestinian civilian control, as the two sides negotiated a final peace treaty.

The interim accords call for one more transfer of territory. Israel had wanted to fold it into a withdrawal marking final borders, but the Palestinians refused

The sides reached a compromise in which they committed to reaching a framework for a final peace treaty in May, with the final interim transfer in June. Negotiators were to resume negotiations over the framework agreement Tuesday outside Washington, with the goal of signing te treaty itself in September.