Quartet Tries To Mediate Mideast
Secretary of State Colin Powell is host for Friday's meeting on the Mideast with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and leaders of the European Union, including senior diplomat Javier Solana.
Meanwhile, Israeli tanks entered the town of Deir al-Balah in Gaza early Friday, surrounding the house of an Islamic Jihad activist, and a Palestinian militant shot and killed an Israeli motorist Friday on a road near a cluster of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, the army said.
The radical Islamic Jihad group claimed responsibility for the shooting.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said Friday he would like to attend Christmas festivities in Bethlehem. However, Israel has made it clear that Arafat will not be permitted to make the short trip from his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah, where he has been marooned for a year.
"I would like to go to participate in the Christmas services in Bethlehem," said Arafat, emerging briefly from his office building. "I would like to go to Gaza, to Nablus, to Hebron, to face the troubles our people are facing."
"I don't think he has a moral right to be there. Arafat being in Bethlehem at Christmas mass is a slap in the face of humanity, and an insult to Christianity," Ranaan Gissin, the spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told CBS News. "He has not brought peace neither to the region or to Bethlehem."
There are no Christmas trees, no lights strung across Manger Square in Bethlehem this year, reports CBS News Correspondent Kimberly Dozier. It's the only way Christians there here feel they can protest, over weeks of near-continuous Israeli army curfew.
Israel says it's simply a matter of security. In the past two years, at least thirteen suicide bombers – most from extremist Islamic groups - have come from the Bethlehem area. Israeli security sources say they have warnings other militants here, are planning to follow suit, this holiday season.
Earlier this week, Solana said, "We have not been able to get the process in motion." He said he doubted the road map would be ready.
The road map is a three-phase plan for Palestinian statehood, improvements in security and Israeli pullbacks in the West Bank and Gaza.
By including the United Nations, Russia and the European Union in peacemaking, the Bush administration hoped to deflect complaints that the United States was monopolizing mediation between Israel and the Palestinians.
President Bush is exploring potential pathways to Mideast peace with U.N., European and Russian officials — but a precise formula remains elusive.
The U.S. pace is geared to the holding of elections in Israel early next year. Europeans and Arab leaders say deeper involvement by the Bush administration is long overdue.
Mr. Bush has already declared his support for creating a Palestinian state in 2005, but the Europeans and Arabs want him to pressure Sharon to clear the way by freezing Jewish settlement building in the disputed West Bank.
President Bush phoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Thursday and told him that a peace "road map" is not ready yet. The president said "we are committed to moving forward at the appropriate time," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
The Israeli military had no comment on an entry into Deir al-Balah. Incursions into Palestinian areas in Gaza take place almost every night, as Israeli forces destroy houses belonging to suspected militants. Israeli officials have said the policy acts as a deterrent, but Palestinians and human rights groups complain that innocent relatives of militants are made to suffer.
The future of the 150 authorized settlements, as well as a number of wildcat hilltop outposts, is a key issue in the Israeli election campaign. Sharon's challenger, Amram Mitzna of Labor, calls for evacuation of all Jewish settlements in Gaza and an immediate Israeli pullout, while negotiating with the Palestinians for a year over the West Bank.
If no agreement is reached, Mitzna says Israel should draw its own border and dismantle all settlement on the Palestinian side, separating Israel from the Palestinians.
Sharon rejects unilateral moves and has spoken out against dismantling any of the settlements. In previous governments, Sharon was responsible for creating many of the settlements Mitzna would evacuate. The Palestinians demand evacuation of all the settlements, which they see as encroachment on their land.