Middle East: Palestinian legislators rallied behind their leadership yesterday as they gathered in the West Bank city of Ramallah to approve a new government led by Prime Minister Mr Ahmed Korei.
Members of the Palestinian Legislative Council voted by a decisive majority to endorse Mr Korei's 25-member cabinet, a move which brings to an end two months of political infighting and is crucial to any future resumption of peace talks with Israel, which will not deal with the president, Mr Yasser Arafat.
The veteran Palestinian leader and Mr Korei sat side by side as they addressed parliamentarians ahead of the confidence vote, their body language betraying no signs of the recent struggles between both men for control of security in the new administration, a battle won by Mr Arafat.
The mood at the gathering was decidedly low-key, the venue a modest hall in Mr Arafat's walled Ramallah compound, where he has been confined for nearly two years under threat of Israeli arrest.
Many buildings in the enclosure were reduced to rubble after Israeli troops stormed the compound in April 2002 as part of a widespread incursion into the West Bank in response to a number of suicide attacks.
Heaps of soil and rubble as well as the charred wrecks of cars remain piled up in the compound, giving it the air of a scrapyard. The exterior walls of some of the remaining concrete buildings have been blasted off, exposing twisted steel rods and internal walls still bearing tatty posters of Mr Arafat.
In his mid-morning address before the confidence vote, Mr Arafat called for an end to three years of violence and said Israel had a "right to live in peace and harmony".
"The time has come for us to get out of this spiral, this destructive war, that will not bring security to you or us," he said, seated at a table with his bodyguards lined up behind him.
Hunched over his script, Mr Arafat occasionally jabbed the air with his finger. He accused the Israeli government of "spreading lies that we don't want peace. I want to talk here to the Israeli people to say in public and in Arabic that this is not true."
Mr Korei followed with a speech in which he reached out to the Israeli government and people, urging them to "open a new page in our relations and joint work in order to achieve just peace."
He said to Israelis: "I extend my hand to you with sincerity in order to begin serious and prompt action for a mutual ceasefire to halt the bloodshed and stop violence so that our security and yours will be respected and our rights and dignity of our peoples will be respected."
Mr Korei also unveiled an ambitious 14 point plan of government, calling an international peace conference to achieve a final solution to the conflict, based on US President George Bush's vision of a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He said he sought a timetable to implement mutual obligations of the road map, beginning with an agreement for a mutual and comprehensive ceasefire. He also called for Palestinian security forces to be consolidated and urged Palestinian militant groups to end all violence.
Mr Korei called on Israel to withdraw from the territories, stop settlement expansion, and remove what he called the apartheid wall which it is constructing to seal off Israel from the West Bank in a bid to prevent Palestinian attacks. Despite some complaints about the government's makeup and Mr Arafat's continued grip on power, the confidence vote taken by a show of hands supported the cabinet by 48 votes to 13, with five abstentions. The cabinet was sworn in shortly after the vote.
Crucially, Mr Korei has been forced to accept Mr Hakam Balawi, an Arafat loyalist, for the top security post of Interior Minister. Mr Balawi will have responsibility for police, civil defence and preventative security while overall security control will be handed to the Supreme National Security Council, of which both Mr Arafat and Mr Korei are members, and which Mr Arafat chairs.