Palestinian leader: Uprising a mistake

Mahmoud Abbas, a front- runner to succeed Yasser Arafat, calls for an end to violence with Israel.

JERUSALEM - The front-runner in next month's election to succeed Yasser Arafat as Palestinian leader said in an interview published Tuesday that the violence employed by Palestinians in their 4-year-old armed uprising was a mistake and that opposition to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip should be expressed peacefully.

Mahmoud Abbas, a former Palestinian prime minister who now heads the Palestine Liberation Organization, told the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat that it was "a legitimate right of the people to express their rejection of the occupation by popular and social means." However, Abbas said, "the use of arms has been damaging and should end."

Abbas, 69, has repeatedly called for an end to the bloodshed that has claimed the lives of about 3,000 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis since the uprising, known as the intifada, erupted in September 2000.

During his term as the Palestinians' first prime minister, from April to September 2003, he promised to curb violence and establish security in the Palestinian-populated territories under the terms of a U.S.-brokered peace plan known as the "road map." But Palestinian groups refused to lay down their weapons unilaterally, and Arafat, then president of the Palestinian Authority, largely blocked attempts by Abbas to bring security matters under the control of the prime minister's office.

Palestinians are to vote on Jan. 9 for a successor to Arafat, who died last month after 10 years as Palestinian Authority president and more than three decades as head of the PLO. Abbas, who quit the prime ministership after losing several battles with Arafat over direction of the authority, is the overwhelming favorite to win the election.

Recent polls indicated he had slightly more support than his principal challenger: Marwan Barghouti, an architect of the uprising who is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison. Barghouti announced Sunday that he would not run and voiced support for Abbas.

In Washington, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the Bush administration welcomes Abbas' call for an end to violence.

"We remain focused on working toward a strategy that will put in place the institutions necessary for a viable state to emerge. But fighting terrorism and putting in a unified security force are key to those efforts," McClellan said.

Israel has said violence must end before peace talks can resume and has held out the prospect of coordinating its planned withdrawal from Gaza and four West Bank settlements with the new Palestinian leadership if it quells violence.

Abbas' remarks appeared two days after Palestinians killed five Israeli soldiers by setting off more than a ton of explosives in a tunnel dug beneath an Israeli military checkpoint in the southern Gaza Strip.

Palestinian leaders have not specifically denounced the tunnel bombing, which was carried out by Hamas and the Fatah Hawks, an offshoot of the Fatah movement to which Abbas belongs.

Leaders of the Palestinians' various armed factions have shown no sign that they would renounce violence even with Abbas in the presidency. On Tuesday, a spokesman for the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, rejected Abbas' call for nonviolence.

"I believe the consensus of the Palestinian people contradicts these statements," Sami Abu Zuhri of Hamas, which has vowed to boycott next month's election, told the Reuters news agency. "The strategies of the Palestinian people should be discussed through a serious and comprehensive dialogue."

A recent opinion poll showed Palestinians expressing divided and sometimes contradictory feelings about whether continued violence would ever achieve the goals of Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and establishment of a Palestinian state.

In a survey conducted this month by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 49 percent of respondents said they supported armed attacks against civilians inside Israel, compared with 54 percent in September. Sixty-four percent said they believed that armed confrontations have helped the Palestinians achieve their rights in ways that negotiations could not, the poll found.

In the interview, Abbas acknowledged that the Palestinian security forces, which include about a dozen agencies, remain in disarray, saying: "There is security chaos. That's why we're demanding and are seeking to unify the security apparatus."

Israel's defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, visited the site of Sunday's tunnel bombing in Gaza, near the border with Egypt, and said Hamas and other groups "are doing their best to continue terror activity."

A short distance away, a Palestinian mortar shell hit a greenhouse in a Jewish settlement, Ganei Tal, on Tuesday evening, killing one worker from Thailand and injuring two, according to the military and Israeli media reports.

The mortar round came from Khan Younis, a nearby Palestinian town, where earlier in the day Israeli troops had demolished seven homes that had been used for cover previously by Palestinians firing mortars, according to the military and Palestinians.

Israeli leaders were preparing responses to Sunday's attack. Israeli media reports said the military planned more assassinations of militants, though officials were reportedly considering actions of limited scope in order not to undermine the ability of the new Palestinian leadership to coax fighters to end attacks.

Also Tuesday, Israeli troops shot three Palestinian security officers, killing one, in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, Palestinian officials said. They said Samir Khafaja, 27, was walking in the street when Israeli forces on the border with Egypt fatally shot him. The army said it opened fire on three suspicious figures crawling near the border.

Late Tuesday, troops entered the West Bank city of Ramallah to arrest a senior official from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the army said. The soldiers shot and wounded the official, Salah Ali, as he tried to flee, the army said.

Israeli troops demolished eight homes in the Khan Younis refugee camp Tuesday, saying militants used the area as a staging ground for mortar attacks.

Israeli officials said the Rafah crossing, through which 4,000 to 5,000 Palestinians pass weekly, would be closed for days. Military officials said they were readying plans for emergency cases.

Information from the Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press and Los Angeles Times was used in this report.

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