Embattled Sharon faces no confidence motion

JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was facing a new challenge to his political survival overnight, with Parliament set to vote on the first no-confidence measure since his broad coalition Government collapsed last week.

Sharon was expected to weather the vote after securing the support of an ultra-nationalist opposition party to bolster his minority Government's 55 seats in the 120-member Assembly.

He is courting the far-right National Union-Yisrael Beitenu faction, to join his new Government.

But his 19-month term of office has been increasingly threatened since the centre-left Labour Party bolted last week in a dispute over funding for Jewish settlements.

Yesterday, former Prime Minister and political rival Benjamin Netanyahu demanded early elections as a condition for accepting Sharon's offer of the post of Foreign Minister.

Netanyahu plans to challenge Sharon for the Likud leadership before the next election.

An early ballot would likely be held by May. Sharon had already been considering the move if he failed to forge a narrow right-wing Government. By law, he must hold an election no later than next October.



Opinion polls show Likud is likely to become the largest party after the next election.

Meanwhile, human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Israel of war crimes through what it said was the unjustified killing and maltreatment of Palestinians during an Army offensive in the West Bank.

The Army reoccupied Palestinian West Bank cities to root out militants behind a suicide bombing campaign.



The 76-page report detailed what Amnesty called unlawful killings and abusive treatment of detainees in Jenin and Nablus, two West Bank cities where Palestinians put up the fiercest resistance to the crackdown.

Cases described included a paralysed detainee beaten by soldiers, demolitions of homes in which a family of eight and a wheelchair-bound man died, and a woman in labour struggling to walk to hospital after troops stopped her ambulance.

"Amnesty believes some of the acts by the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) described [here] amount to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes," said the report.

- REUTERS

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