MIDDLE EAST: Mr Ariel Sharon still plans to evacuate all settlements in the Gaza Strip even though his party overwhelmingly voted against this plan in a referendum earlier this week, the prime minister's deputy, Mr Ehud Olmert, said yesterday, Peter Hirschberg reports from Jerusalem
Mr Bush's National Security Adviser, Dr Condoleezza Rice, meanwhile, is to meet Palestinian Prime Minister Mr Ahmed Qurie in Germany in mid-May. It will be Mr Qurie's highest-level meeting with an American official since he took office seven months ago.
Asked on Army Radio whether Mr Sharon still planned to implement his plan to evacuate all 21 settlements in Gaza as part of a unilateral move, despite it being rejected by his own party, Mr Olmert replied: "Correct." In the course of the week, Mr Sharon's aides raised the possibility that the prime minister might try to refloat a watered-down version of his plan, with fewer settlements listed for evacuation. But Mr Olmert said hardline ministers in the ruling party would oppose this idea as well.
Mr Sharon said yesterday that a way had to be found "to carry out the disengagement plan because of its importance to the future of Israel". He made his comments during a condolence visit at the home in southern Israel of the family of a settler woman who was shot dead last Sunday, along with her four daughters, in Gaza. The meeting was private, but family members recorded the prime minister and then handed the cassette to the media.
Mr Bush is planning to send a letter to Mr Qurie stating that issues relating to a final-status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians must be negotiated between the two sides. The president angered Palestinians last month when he provided Mr Sharon with a letter saying that Israel would not have to withdraw from all of the West Bank and that Palestinian refugees would be able to return to a future Palestinian state, not Israel.
In an interview to be published today in Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper, Associated Press reports that the president signals that the letter will not include guarantees, and that a Palestinian state by 2005, as stipulated in the road map peace plan, "may be hard . . . I readily concede the date has slipped some, primarily because violence sprung up".
Israeli warplanes, meanwhile, hit Hizbullah positions in southern Lebanon yesterday after shells fired by the militant group killed an Israeli soldier and wounded five others in a disputed border area.
In the West Bank town of Tulkarm, two Palestinian militants were killed in a gunbattle with Israeli troops. In the town of Nablus, an 18-year-old Palestinian was shot dead on the roof of his house. The army said troops had opened fire after they spotted an armed man, but witnesses said the teenager was unarmed.