MIDEAST: The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, told the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Mr Mahmoud Abbas, yesterday that reaching a short-term ceasefire with Hamas was insufficient and that he had to confront the Islamic extremists and ensure that they were no longer able to carry out acts of terrorism.
"Violence and terror is not the way to build a state," Mr Powell declared. The Palestinian Authority had to go beyond "having a ceasefire . . . to end violence and the capacity for violence".
Mr Powell, who held a day of talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, set out the uncompromising American attitude to Hamas precisely as a Hamas gunman killed an Israeli motorist on a West Bank road near Ramallah. The victim's wife was injured in the shooting incident, as were two elderly relatives also in the car, American citizens who were in Israel to visit their family.
Some 30 Israelis have been killed since the Aqaba peace summit two weeks ago, most of them in attacks carried out by Hamas.
Close to 40 Palestinians have died in the same period, four of them in the course of attacks on Israeli targets, many others civilians hit in Israeli assassination strikes against alleged Hamas leaders.
Mr Powell's day of diplomacy was designed to try to salvage the US and European "road map" process to Palestinian statehood in the light of this upsurge in violence. But while he urged the two sides to move as rapidly as they could to seize what he perceived as an opportunity for progress, the statements by Mr Abbas and the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, offered little scope for optimism.
Mr Abbas intimated that he had no intention of using force against any extremist Palestinian factions, insisting instead that the ceasefire negotiations would soon bear fruit and bring a complete end to attacks on Israelis.
Israel, said Mr Abbas, had to dismantle Jewish settlements, end its demolition of Palestinian homes, lift curfew and closure measures and cancel the ongoing siege around the Ramallah headquarters of Mr Yasser Arafat. In short, said Mr Abbas, Israel had to "change itself from an enemy into a partner".
Mr Sharon, for his part, emphasised that there would be no diplomatic progress whatsoever until Mr Abbas confronted the gunmen and bombers. "As long as terror continues, as long as violence continues, as long as this terrible incitement continues, there will be no progress," he said flatly. "There will be no peace with terror."
And while Mr Powell urged Israel to confine assassinations to genuine cases of intercepting bombers on their way to carry out an attack, rather than going "beyond that to individuals or situations where it might not be a ticking bomb", he was broadly supportive of Mr Sharon's policies.
The way forward now, said Mr Powell, was for Mr Abbas to begin to "retake" security responsibility from Israel in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Bethlehem so that ordinary Palestinians would gradually gain "confidence" that groups such as Hamas "don't have the answer".
Underlining the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue of the deaf, Mr Sharon promptly said he was ready to transfer that responsibility, as soon as Mr Abbas had the security apparatus in place to accept it, while Mr Abbas urged Israel to pull back without delay.
Mr Powell branded Hamas the "enemy of peace" and declared that as long as it retained its "commitment to terror and violence and a desire to destroy the state of Israel, I think this is a problem we have to deal with in its entirety".