Israel to begin Gaza pullout in peace move

By MARK HEINRICH

JERUSALEM - Israel will begin withdrawing forces from the Gaza Strip on Monday in a disengagement deal with Palestinian authorities to advance a fragile US-backed peace plan, security sources said.

But Palestinian militants put off declaring a truce with Israel amid factional wrangling over terms, as US presidential adviser Condoleezza Rice met Israeli leaders to discuss problems on the "road map" to peace.

Under the withdrawal plan, Israel would cease lightning incursions and dismantle military checkpoints, which have paralysed Palestinian life in Gaza, in return for Palestinian authorities taking security responsibility and cracking down on militant groups, the security sources said.

They confirmed accounts from Palestinian officials involved in high-level talks with Israelis on Sunday to iron out details of the pullout from Gaza, a bastion for militants waging a 33-month-old revolt for statehood.

Palestinian police conducted exercises in parts of the Mediterranean desert strip to prepare for the security handover.

The "road map," unfurled by President Bush at a June 4 summit with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, was torn from the outset by violence, before the White House dispatched top diplomats to salvage it.

Visits by Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rice a week later appear to have concentrated minds on each side, though the process remains vulnerable.

Divergent Israeli and Palestinian expectations, Palestinian factional disarray and the Israeli government's lack of trust in the ability or inclination of the Palestinian Authority to curb militants all pose major obstacles.

The road map prescribes confidence-building moves by both sides and the creation by 2005 of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip alongside Israel, which occupied both territories in the 1967 Middle East war.

Rice, who met Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank on Saturday, held talks on Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and was to see his defense and foreign ministers later. She has avoided comment on her trip.



A formal joint truce announcement by half a dozen militant factions had been anticipated during the day but officials of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement said it had been put off to Monday or Tuesday.

"All factions are in full agreement on the truce itself but some voice differences on political issues," said Ahmed Ghneim, a senior Fatah official involved in talks that continued overnight into Sunday.

He said stumbling blocks included a radical leftist faction's refusal to stop fighting and a demand by Islamist hard-liners that references to the "road map" be deleted, because they oppose peace-making with Israel in principle.

Confusion arose after the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said it would not defy "the national consensus" on a truce, while not expressly endorsing it, and Islamic militants said dissent within Fatah was the problem.

Militant groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas said they had agreed tentatively to a conditional, three-month halt to attacks.

But the two groups, behind scores of bombings targeting Israelis, said any truce hinged on Israel ending "track-and-kill" operations against militants and freeing prisoners, among other conditions.

Israel says it is bound only to agreements with the Palestinian Authority and if it does not swiftly disarm and jail militants, it would resume hunting them down.

Palestinian officials fear that trying to wipe out the popular Islamic factions could provoke a civil war.

- REUTERS