Sides To Mull U.S. Compromise

Palestinian and Israeli representatives ended a crucial round of truce talks on Sunday night and will now consider a compromise plan submitted by U.S. mediators, Palestinian officials said.

U.S. diplomats were trying to establish a ceasefire in an 18-month-old Palestinian uprising against occupation that would encourage Israel to free Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from confinement to attend an Arab summit in Beirut this week.

"We sat with the Americans -- and the Israelis sat with the Americans separately. We were given an American compromise document," said Mohammed Dahlan, chief of the Palestinian Preventive Security Service in the Gaza Strip.

"We will study it and give our response to it in a meeting that will be held tomorrow. The Israelis were also given that same document," Dahlan, one of the top officials in Arafat's Palestinian Authority, told Reuters, without giving details on the compromise proposal.

There was no immediate Israeli comment on Sunday night's talks. But an Israeli political source said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would convene senior ministers on Monday to discuss allowing Arafat to go to Beirut and that a final decision was expected by Tuesday morning, the eve of the summit expected to endorse a Saudi proposal for an Arab peace accord with Israel.

U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni convened Israeli and Palestinian security commanders in an undisclosed location to try to settle the final differences over implementing a truce plan negotiated last year by CIA director George Tenet.

U.S. officials are believed to be keen for Arafat to attend the March 27-28 summit to lend momentum to the Saudi plan as Washington seeks support in the region for a campaign against Iraq. Most Arabs too see his presence as essential to the plan.

"In my view, so long as the terrorism continues, (Arafat) will not get out of here," Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told his Cabinet on Sunday, according to an Israeli official present at the meeting.

Sharon also told his ministers that he would like to attend the summit himself to explain the Israeli position on the Mideast conflict. "I think it would be appropriate that I be permitted to appear before the conference," he said. "Because in the last analysis, no plan can be carried out without Israel."

However, Sharon is widely despised throughout the Arab world, and there appeared no chance that he would be invited to Lebanon.

The Palestinians said barring Arafat from the summit would only further escalate tensions. "Israel wants to dictate its conditions to us, but they should know very well that this blackmail will not have any effect on our political decisions," said Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo.

Meanwhile, Israeli commandos, backed by helicopters, on Sunday tracked and killed four militants who slipped across the normally quiet border with Jordan.

Overall, 11 people were killed in Israel and the Palestinian territories Sunday.

Several men armed with automatic rifles opened fire on a Jordanian border patrol overnight and then escaped across the shallow Yarmouk River that serves as the frontier with Israel, Jordan's army said.

An elite Israeli commando unit, alerted by a breach in the electronic border fence, took up pursuit on the Israeli side in the thick underbrush. Israeli security forces cleared out hundreds of hikers who were walking along the wooded trails in the area.

The Israelis followed the boot tracks, with commandos, snipers and helicopters all opening fire when they found the four men, dressed in military uniforms, about three kilometers (two miles) inside the border, the army said. The men were also carrying explosives, according to the army. The infiltrators were not immediately identified.

There were conflicting reports about how the raid began. Initial word was that Jordanian forces encountered a suspicious vehicle and killed two people inside, while four others crossed the border. However, the Jordanian government later denied that.

Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994 and the border has remained mostly quiet, with the security forces from the two countries working to prevent attacks. However, in rare cases, militant Palestinians have infiltrated Israel from Jordan, where more than half the population is of Palestinian origin, and many oppose the peace deal with Israel.

In other violence Sunday, Palestinian militants shot and killed an Israeli woman riding a bus in the West Bank near the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Israeli troops in pursuit of the attackers killed a Palestinian policeman in a gunbattle at a checkpoint.

In the Gaza Strip troops shot dead three Palestinians near a Jewish settlement. The army said the men were shot when soldiers spotted them crawling up to the perimeter fence surrounding a group of settlements in southern Gaza and planting a bomb there.

Also in Gaza, a Palestinian man in civilian clothes was shot dead as he approached Israeli troops near a border crossing with Israel. The area has been the scene of repeated gunbattles, and the Israeli army said the man refused orders to stop.

Zinni, who arrived 11 days ago, has been talking with both sides about a U.S. truce plan worked out last year by CIA director George Tenet. Zinni planned Sunday night talks in Tel Aviv with the Israelis and Palestinians, who have endorsed the U.S. cease-fire plan in principle,but remain in dispute on several key issues.

Israel, backed by the United States, has repeatedly called on Arafat to clamp down on militants. The Palestinians say Israel must pull back its troops to the positions they held at the outbreak of the fighting in September 2000.

Sunday's meeting between the two sides could determine whether U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney goes to Egypt this week for talks with Arafat. Cheney said Sunday he had no plans to meet Arafat, because the Palestinian leader had yet to meet U.S. conditions of curbing violence.

If Arafat would "put out the kind of effort that we haven't seen up until now ... then I'd be prepared to meet with him. But to date they have not gotten to that point yet," Cheney said on CNN's "Late Edition."

However, Cheney said that Israel should permit Arafat to attend the Beirut summit. "It's our view that the summit is likely to be more productive ... if in fact he's allowed to attend," Cheney said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

At the summit, Arab leaders are expected to focus on a proposal floated by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, under which Arab nations would offer Israel peace in exchange for full withdrawal from areas Israel seized in the 1967 Mideast war.

A Saudi newspaper Sunday quoted Abdullah as saying he believes Sharon has rejected the proposal. "I found out that everyone wants this proposal except for one person and that's Sharon," the daily al-Watan quoted Abdullah as saying Saturday.

Sharon has neither accepted or rejected the proposal, saying Israel has not seen the details. However, he said that a return to the pre-1967 war borders — meaning a pullout from all of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights — would endanger Israel's security.