ISRAEL/GAZA: Barely able to scrape together a parliamentary majority as he pushes his controversial plan for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon yesterday began formal talks with the opposition leader, Labour's Shimon Peres, about bringing Labour into a "national unity" government. David Horovitz reports from Jerusalem.
But while Mr Peres is already talking about the more moderate attitudes to the Palestinians such a coalition would take, and while he and his Labour colleagues are already bickering over who would get which key ministerial job, a Likud-Labour partnership may still be months away, if it ever comes to pass.
Indeed, Mr Sharon may have opened the talks mainly as a scare tactic to persuade rebels in his own Likud party to fall into line.
Mr Peres, the 80-year-old former prime minister, is desperate for one more term of ministerial office, and said yesterday that he would "not forgive myself" if, because of any Labour hesitation, Mr Sharon's plan for a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza by the end of next year was scuppered.
So Mr Peres is setting up a team of Labour negotiators and hopes to get down to substantive talks with a Likud team next week. He said that in preliminary talks yesterday, he suggested accelerating the Gaza pull-out and returning to the "road map" peace framework with the Palestinians, and that Mr Sharon said all such options were open.
But Mr Sharon, now in his late 70s, may be content to string Mr Peres along for a while. His current coalition is far from stable, but he narrowly survived another three parliamentary motions of no-confidence yesterday evening, and the opening of channels to the moderate Labour opposition is already having a remarkably sobering effect on some of his most vociferous critics.
Mr Uzi Landau, the hardline minister who has been one of the fiercest opponents of the prime minister's disengagement plan, said yesterday that he and other Likud rebels would promise to vote with Mr Sharon on any and every issue for the next seven months - if only contacts with Labour were halted.
Such a pledge would lapse next March, Mr Landau and the other rebels made clear however, since it is then that the government is scheduled to vote on dismantling specific Gaza settlements.
Mr Sharon told Likud Knesset members yesterday that they were to blame for his overtures to Labour. If he couldn't rely on them to vote with him in parliament, he said, he had no alternative but to woo Labour, with whom the Likud has partnered in uneasy and largely ineffectual unity governments in the past.
And if they didn't want a coalition with Labour, he warned, he would ultimately have no choice but to call new elections.
A 72-year-old Palestinian man died of a heart attack after being buried in the rubble of his home, demolished by Israelis in Gaza's Khan Younis refugee camp early yesterday morning, Palestinian doctors said.
The Israeli army said it believed the home, like others it demolished, was uninhabited.