Word: gaza
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...Reasons for Bush's newfound impatience with Sharon are not hard to find. The Israeli leader's escalation of military action in the West Bank and Gaza has substantially raised the Palestinian body count (163 Palestinians have been killed over the past two weeks) but it has failed to curb attacks on Israelis - 59 Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks over the same period. Escalation has begotten only further escalation, with no end in sight. And with the U.S. now actively courting Arab support for a campaign against Saddam Hussein, the price of inaction had become intolerable for Washington - America...
...Despite killing more than 200 alleged militants and arresting around 2,000 more, Israel's invasions of Palestinian towns such as Ramallah and refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza do not appear to have achieved the desired results. Israeli analysts noted that Palestinian militants preserved much of their fighting capability by avoiding full-on clashes with Israeli forces. And even in the course of the current operations in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian gunmen and suicide bombers have struck repeatedly inside Israel, as if to send the message that the Israeli raids could not deter them...
...While Arafat is supposed to disarm the militias, he may see at least some of them as a strategic reserve. Their armed actions in the West Bank and Gaza over the past six weeks have certainly helped stoke the crisis that brought the Americans rushing back to rehabilitate Arafat. The Palestinian leader is no more likely to trust Sharon than vice versa, and he's unlikely - and quite possibly unable - to relinquish his capability to make life intolerable for the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza...
...offering is simple: he proposes that all the Arab countries state in advance that they will make peace with Israel if Israel relinquishes the lands it conquered in the 1967 war--that is, if it returns the Golan Heights to Syria and hands over the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. That equation, "land for peace," is as old as U.N. Resolution 242, passed in 1967, which the Saudis had already embraced by attending the 1991 Middle East peace conference in Madrid. But this is the first time the Saudis have explicitly defined "peace" as full normalization between...
...Fleischer's statement suggests that some in the Bush administration believe peace can be achieved in the West Bank and Gaza prior to, and separately from moves toward a political settlement. That's dangerous, because it ignores the reality that the violence is not separate from the political conflict between Israelis and Palestinians - it's an expression of that conflict. Arafat urges his followers to fight until they have won a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Sharon warned this week that no peace talks can occur until the Palestinians had been "badly beaten" and were ready to accept...