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Israeli Talks on Ceasefire "Nothing but Fresh Lie": Palestinian Official
A senior Palestinian official on Wednesday dismissed as "nothing but fresh lie" Israeli claims that it has implemented a US-brokered ceasefire plan with the Palestinians.
"Israel's talk of a ceasefire is nothing but another lie to deceive the world, because the Israelis does not stop its aggression on the Palestinians," said Marwan Barghouti, leader of the Palestinian mainstream movement Fatah, in a telephone interview with the Cairo-based Voice of Arabs radio from Ramallah.
The Palestinians will continue their intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation, until they regain all their legitimate rights and establish an independence Palestinian state, Barghouti said.
"The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) will disregard Israel's request to arrest the intifada activists," he said, " instead, the activists should be honored for struggling against the Israeli occupation."
He called for greater Arab political and moral support for the Palestinians.
The U.S.-brokered Palestinian-Israeli ceasefire went into effect last Wednesday, but sporadic firings and confrontations between the two sides have continued.
During his visit in the Spanish capital of Madrid on Tuesday, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat called for immediate deployment of international observers in the occupied Palestinian territories to monitor the fragile Palestinian-Israeli truce.
He reaffirmed the PNA's committment to peace, saying that the PNA will not tolerate any act against the ceasefire and the Mitchell report.
An international panel led by former U.S. senator George Mitchell, entrusted to investigate the causes of the Palestinian- Israeli violence, calls for an immediate ceasefire, a freeze on Jewish settlement activities and Palestinian curb on attacks against Israeli targets.
The nearly nine months of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed, triggered by Israeli violation of an Islamic holy shrine in East Jerusalem last September, have left over 600 people dead, most of them Palestinians.
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