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US Pressures Israel to Create Chances for Ceasefire: Paper
The US is pressuring Israel to play down its demand for a period of total quiet and immediately freeze the settlement activities for reaching a ceasefire with the Palestinians, the Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday.
Israel and the Palestinians should start counting the seven days of complete quiet even if only a partial ceasefire takes hold on the ground, the English-language daily quoted a senior U.S. official as saying.
The pressure has been mounting following an announcement that Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat have agreed to meet in Berlin next week to discuss a gradual, area-by-area ceasefire.
The U.S. official said that the U.S. administration supports the idea of a "rolling ceasefire," which would start in one part of the West Bank or Gaza Strip and later spread to the rest of the Palestinian territories.
"Our view will likely be that, if you start to see this rolling ceasefire, then you'd better start counting the seven days liberally. Does that mean exactly seven, or three, or six? Let's be a little more liberal than calendar days," the official told the newspaper.
In June, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon agreed during a meeting that a seven-day period of total quiet should precede a six-week cooling-off period as the hawkish Israeli leader insisted on it.
Powell agreed that Sharon had the power to dictate when the period of total quiet would begin. However, the U.S. found later, as many critics had already pointed out, that Israel used the seven-day period as an excuse for indefinitely postponing the next stage of the ceasefire.
According to the Mitchell report recommendations by an international fact-finding committee on the Israeli-Palestinian violence, the two sides should stop the violence, carry out confidence-building measures in a cooling-off period and finally resume their peace talks.
However, as Israel never began counting the seven-day period, the ceasefire could not go into the next cooling-off period.
Israel is obliged to freeze its settlement construction in the cooling-off period, but it can also carry out the freeze even earlier, the U.S. official told the newspaper.
"The settlement freeze under our reading of the Mitchell (report) comes in the CBM (confidence-building measures) period. Now we've said to Israel that if you get into cooling off and you have some confidence you are going to get (to the next stage), why don't you stop (settlement construction) earlier?" the official said.
Israel has built more than 150 Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, a move which violates the international law. The Palestinians have repeatedly demanded Israel evacuate all the Jewish settlers or at least stop the settlement expansion on the current stage.
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