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Shooting Shouldn't Withhold Pullout From Kalkilya: Peres
Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Sunday that the shooting attack in northern Jerusalem should not affect the army withdrawal from the Palestinian West Bank city of Kalkilya, planned for Sunday.
"We have to judge each place by the situation there, if it is quiet there, we will leave. We have no interest in just being there," Peres told Channel Two television.
Peres made the remarks after a shooting attack on a bus at the French Hill junction in northern Jerusalem, during which two Israelis were killed and 40 others injured, five of them seriously.
A Palestinian gunman, a 34-year-old Islamic Jihad member from the West Bank city of Hebron, was killed. Two Palestinians were seen running away into a nearby valley toward a Palestinian village. Security forces are reportedly pursuing them.
The Palestinian Islamic resistance movement Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack in a telephone call to Palestinian Television in the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
The caller said that the attack was in revenge for the killing of a senior Hamas activist Jamil Jadallah by Israeli forces in Bethlehem last Wednesday.
Earlier Sunday, Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said at the weekly cabinet meeting that as part of the gradual army withdrawal plan, troops would pull out of the Kalkilya soon, perhaps even Sunday evening, because the troop presence in Area A under full Palestinian control had accomplished its objectives.
Ben-Eliezer also said that the army operation has led to tensions among the upper echelons of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), as well as dissatisfaction with PNA Chairman Yasser Arafat among senior Palestinian officials.
The Israeli troops are still staying in five Palestinian cities of Jenin, Tul Karm, Ramallah, Nablus and Kalkilya. The army pulled out of Bethlehem and its nearby Beit Jalla area last week.
The army incursion was launched after Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi was assassinated on October 17. Israel has come under intense international pressure to end its reoccupation of the Palestinian territories.
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