Word: gaza
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President Bush's Middle East agenda requires that he get Ariel Sharon talking, when they meet today, about moving into fast-track negotiations over creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Sharon's agenda is plainly quite different: He wants to talk about Yasser Arafat's links to violence and about remaking the Palestinian Authority to Israel's specifications, about a long-term armistice (rather than a fast-track peace) and about investing heavily in constructing Israeli military buffer zones in the West Bank and Gaza rather than preparing to withdraw, as Bush has urged, to "internationally...
...Israelis for a "big crime" against a "sacred place" after fighting and fire broke out at the church, where Israel was demanding the surrender of dozens of Palestinian fighters. He also condemned Israel's assault on the Jenin refugee camp, the deaths of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and infrastructure damage. The Palestinian leader later toured Ramallah, smiling and waving. Israel lifted its siege after he acquiesced in the jailing of six wanted men. As Israeli troops entered Nablus in a crackdown on "terrorism," diplomatic efforts went on. But the U.N., citing Israeli noncooperation, abandoned plans to conduct...
...Palestinian Authority had in recent weeks won a temporary agreement from Hamas and other radical groups, in the interests of Palestinian unity, to concentrate their attacks in the West Bank and Gaza, rather than sending bombers into Israel. But such agreements are unlikely to impress the Israelis and Americans, and they're unlikely to be more than temporary. Hamas is well aware that it will be the first casualty of any cease-fire - the fact that Arafat secured his own release by handing over to American and British jailers six men wanted by Israel has not been lost on Palestinian...
...domestic political restraints on Ariel Sharon are even more pronounced than those on Arafat. Bush wants the prime minister to enter negotiations over Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza, but what Sharon wants is to build buffer zones in those territories and enter only into "long-term interim agreements" - a notion dismissed out of hand by Palestinian and moderate Arab leaders, who have embraced a consensus for peace with Israel on the basis of some version of its 1967 borders. That's a prospect Sharon has ruled out, and Benjamin Netanyahu's challenge from the right for leadership...
...friends went to Franji in the early afternoon. One of them pushed Abdullah's bicycle up the sandy alley to her front door in Gaza's poor Sabra neighborhood. They had heard that Abdullah was dead, shot by masked policemen from Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority after he joined a rally by Hamas students that had passed by his school. The policemen fired into the crowd, and Abdullah took a round in the head. But none of Abdullah's friends wanted to be the one to tell Franji that the long battle for power between Arafat and the Islamists...