A covey of diplomats began arriving in Israel Thursday in renewed efforts to find a way out of the increasingly violent struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, although no one seemed to have any concrete idea of how to break the impasse.
"Something could come of this," Shimon Peres, the dovish foreign minister, ever optimistic despite repeated setbacks, told Israeli radio.
William J. Burns, the American Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, arrived Thursday, met with the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat in Ramallah Thursday night and was to see Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Mr. Peres on Friday. But reports from Washington about debates raging within the administration suggest that the Americans really do not have any plan.
"There has been too much suffering and too much death for both Israelis and Palestinians," Mr. Burns told reporters during a stopover in Cairo, where he met with Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak.
"Humanitarian problems, the daily humiliation that ordinary Palestinians suffer under occupation are getting worse every day," Mr. Burns said.
With Jerusalem under a tight security alert for a third day over reports of a bomber on the way, and Tel Aviv put on a similar alert this evening, one aspect of that humiliation, in the form of roadblocks, became increasingly evident today.
All week there have been lines lasting hours at the two checkpoints leading from Ramallah to Jerusalem, and new roadblocks have been thrown up in the northern districts of the city. This morning Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and rubber-coated bullet to disperse Palestinians angered by a shutdown of the Kalandia crossing point.
The army set up a new roadblock at a highway intersection near the West Bank village of Hisme at 7 a.m. and the line quickly grew so long that people began abandoning their cars. United for once in frustration, Israeli settlers and Palestinians trudged toward Jerusalem on foot, cursing the soldiers.
In what is certain to shock Israelis, the authorities announced tonight that they had arrested a Palestinian man and his Jewish Israeli wife as prime suspects in the May 22 Rishon le Zion suicide bombing. They were identified as Ibrahim Sarahana, 33, from the Bethlehem area, and Marina Pinski, 26, who immigrated from Russia 11 years ago. They were said to have driven the 16-year old suicide bomber to the mall, which Mr. Sarahana is believed to have chosen as a target.
The army continued its now daily raids into Palestinian territory, with Hebron today's target. Columns of dozens of armored personnel carriers and jeeps backed by tanks entered the West Bank city around 4 a.m. and pulled out by midday. The troops arrested four Palestinians, including an Islamic Jihad leader, Mohammed Sider, whom Palestinian officials said had been the target of two Israeli assassination attempts.
The army pulled out of Bethlehem this evening, after four days of house-to-house searches and snipers in control of Manger Square. A woman unsuccessfully tried to stab a paramilitary border police trooper near the Church of the Nativity in the course of the day. The army also said it had detained six Palestinians in a village near Tulkarm, and went back into Jenin and imposed a curfew on the city. At least one explosion was heard there. There was also skirmishing in Gaza, with 11 Palestinians reported wounded.
An Israeli human rights group charged today that Israeli soldiers killed a 17-year-old Palestinian in their custody in Ramallah during the army's huge incursion earlier this spring, and demanded an official investigation.
The rights group, B'Tselem, said that the Palestinian, Murad Awaisa, was shot dead after being detained with other Palestinians in an apartment building at the beginning of the incursion on March 31. He was taken away from the other detainees, the report said, and gunfire was later heard. He was found with one bullet near his heart and another in his knee, B'Tselem said.
On the Israeli political front, Mr. Sharon gained further stature when Shas, the party representing ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Jews, said it would rejoin the government coalition and vote for a belt-tightening economic package it had at first opposed. Shas controls a crucial 17 seats in the fragmented Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. The seats are crucial to holding a parliamentary majority, but Mr. Sharon defied Shas, firing their ministers when they opposed the package, to the delight of many other Israelis.
Mr. Burns is to be joined here on Monday by the Central Intelligence Agency director, George Tenet, who has been given the task of reforming the Palestinian Authority and its security forces, presently a ramshackle arrangement in which Mr. Arafat has maintained a one-man rule by playing subordinates and factions against each other.
Other diplomatic visitors include the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, and, in the coming days, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, Javier Solana, and an Egyptian presidential adviser, Osama al Baz. Mr. Baz's visit precedes a a visit to Washington by Mr. Mubarak.
In a token nod to the pressure for reform, the Palestinian Authority formally announced today that Mr. Arafat had finally signed the Basic Law, a kind of constitution. The measure was approved five years ago by the Palestinian legislature and had sat on Mr. Arafat's desk since then.
But, in the murky fashion that characterizes Mr. Arafat's rule, it turned out that while he actually signed the paper some time late Tuesday night, there are several versions of the bill and no one - not the legislators nor Palestinian reformers outside Mr. Arafat's circle, nor even his advisers - knew exactly what it was that he had signed.
(China Daily May 31, 2002)
