US envoy meets Qureia as bloodshed continues

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OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (AFP) — A US Middle East envoy held talks with Palestinian Premier Ahmed Qureia in a bid to revive the stalled peace process Saturday as a Palestinian student was shot dead and Israeli forces moved onto high alert around Tel Aviv.

Kamleh Al Shuli, 20, was hit by two bullets in the chest when soldiers at a roadblock opened fire on a taxi taking her to Al Najah University in the West Bank town of Nablus, medical and security sources said.

Israeli military sources said the taxi had driven through the checkpoint and that soldiers gave chase and fired at it after discharging warning shots. Shuli's death brought to 3,643 the toll since the start of the Palestinian Intifada in September 2000. Israeli police, meanwhile, reinforced security in the Tel Aviv area and the coastal plain near the West Bank after a threat of an attack in the area, public radio reported on Saturday.

Police set up barricades in the region and closed a main east-west road linking the West Bank to the coast. Against the tense background, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Satterfield met Saturday with Qureia in the West Bank as part of a tour aimed at breathing fresh life into the moribund peace process.

The US envoy is to meet Sunday with Dov Weisglass, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's chief of staff, as well as Avi Dichter chief of Israel's domestic intelligence service, Shin Bet, and General Aharon Zeevi, chief of military intelligence. Qureia said he told Satterfield that Sharon's threats of unilateral actions were an “obstacle to peace” and also demanded a halt to the building of Israel's controversial separation barrier in the West Bank.

But Qureia also said no date had yet been fixed for a widely anticipated summit with Sharon.

“First we must ensure that there would be results from such a meeting,” he said, adding that senior Palestinian Cabinet officials and top Sharon aides would soon hold more preparatory talks.

Violence has recently been at its lowest levels since the current conflict erupted, but UN Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen warned that failure to relaunch peace talks could set off an explosion worse than any since then.

“We have a narrow window of opportunity, one in which the parties need to take positive steps to truly put the peace process back on track,” he said in a briefing to the UN Security Council.

“If hopes once again are shattered, and this fragile new peace process does not succeed, then the alternative might be chaos and massive violence, maybe on an even worse scale — and a worse type — than what we've seen so far.”

He said the result could be a “crisis of expectation” if the latest bid to get the peace process back on track came to a standstill.

His comments were echoed in Cairo by Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, who said that the time was now right for a resumption of peace talks between the two sides.

“I think that there are favourable signs pointing towards a new opportunity that the Arabs and the Palestinians must be ready to seize,” he said.

Maher also vowed that Egypt, which last week hosted talks between Palestinian factions over a possible truce, would continue its contacts with Israel “to serve the Palestinian cause.”

Meanwhile, US President George W. Bush turned up the heat on Israel, warning it against taking actions that could hinder the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

“Israel must be mindful ... that they don't make decisions that make it hard to create a Palestinian state,” he told reporters in Washington. “It's in Israel's interest there be a Palestinian state.”

Asked about signs that his administration has been taking a harder line towards its staunch ally, Bush stressed “I haven't changed my opinion” about the steps necessary to break the deadly cycle of violence in the region.

In Gaza City, several thousand Palestinians marched to demand freedom for prisoners held by Israel and a halt to construction of the Israeli barrier, in a demonstration organised by Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.