With both sides voicing optimism about the progress of the ongoing Israeli- Palestinian negotiations in Cairo, Israel is actively preparing to vacate the Gaza Strip and the Jericho area during the month of May, senior official sources were quoted as saying Wednesday.
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, while declining to confirm this specific time frame, told reporters Wednesday that he, too, believed the pullback could be completed “within a small number of weeks” after the signing of the accord.
Peres said there had been impressive progress at the negotiations, which were held this week in the Egyptian capital.
Similar expressions of optimism were voiced by the heads of the Israeli and Palestinian delegations on Wednesday, when the week’s round of talks in Cairo were concluded.
“I do believe that we are coming closer to conclude our negotiations,” said Maj. Gen. Amnon Shahak, deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force, who leads the Israeli team.
And the chief negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization, Nabil Sha’ath, also told reporters that significant progress had been made in the talks this week, adding that concluding the negotiations “will take only two or three weeks at the utmost.”
The two sides reported progress on both security issues and on the transfer of civilian authority to the Palestinians.
They also reportedly reached agreement on the deployment and the positioning of the Palestinian police force that will be put in place after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho.
But they left the issue of the size of the police force for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat to decide when they meet to finalize the agreement.
Despite all the buoyant assessments of the talks’ progress, a shadow appeared to darken these reports from a different quarter – Paris – where Israeli officials participating in separate economic talks with the PLO reported serious erosions in previously agreed-upon terms.
These officials accused the Palestinian side of backing away from earlier understandings.
The officials spoke prior to a top-level meeting Wednesday in Paris between the Israeli finance minister, Avraham Shohat, and Ahmed Karia, head of the PLO’s economic division.
Shohat suggested after the meeting that the Palestinians’ tactics were designed to secure concessions and did not represent a real withdrawal from previous understandings.
He warned that if Palestinians insisted on having their own taxation and customs system, rather than coordinating with Israel as previously agreed, the inevitable consequence would be a total separation between the Jewish state and the Palestinian entity.
This, said Shohat, would surely not serve the Palestinians’ economic interests.
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