- JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Palestinian
Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie warned Israel Friday that a controversial barrier
it is building in the West Bank would kill off a U.S.-backed "road
map" peace plan.
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- Adding to pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,
a new opinion poll showed that half of Israelis see him as untrustworthy
as he considers a go-it-alone plan to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians
on Israel's terms.
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- With the "road map" stymied by mutual mistrust,
Sharon has said he may evacuate some isolated settlements and set borders
along the barrier, in effect annexing occupied land where Palestinians
seek statehood as envisioned by the "road map."
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- He says a Palestinian failure to disarm militants behind
suicide attacks is pushing him toward unilateral security steps.
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- Palestinians say Israel cannot achieve peace by hemming
them in behind what they call a new "Berlin Wall." Sharon's plan-in-the-making
has also drawn criticism from Washington.
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- "(The barrier) will kill the (peace) process. It
will kill anyone who speaks of peace. ... Now there is relative quiet.
But the terror will start anew. The barrier can't prevent it," Qurie
told Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest daily, in an interview.
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- Relative calm has prevailed for weeks. But in a flare-up
before dawn Friday, Palestinian gunmen wounded seven ultra-Orthodox Jews
who defied Israeli military orders by praying at a shrine in the West Bank
city of Nablus.
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- Israeli security sources said one of the Jews was critically
wounded when gunmen fired at their vehicle near Joseph's Tomb, revered
by Jews as the burial site of the biblical patriarch.
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- FLASHPOINT BARRIER
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- Israel says the barrier, a swathe of razor-wire fencing,
walls and trenches, is meant to keep suicide bombers out of its cities
and has already thwarted 20 such attacks in two months.
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- But the barrier often deviates from the border well into
the West Bank to incorporate Jewish settlements.
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- "This is not how you achieve security. This is just
a way to preserve the conflict. No one in the world will accept it,"
Qurie said of the internationally condemned project.
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- Leaders of Sharon's right-wing Likud party said Wednesday
Sharon had outlined a "long-term redeployment" as an alternative
to a peace deal and it was accepted by most of its legislators.
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- But a poll published in Maariv Friday showed 50 percent
of Israelis felt Sharon was unreliable, compared with 40 percent last August.
Forty-seven percent see him as trustworthy now.
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- A Maariv poll published last week found that 55 percent
of Israelis were not satisfied with Sharon's performance -- his poorest
rating since his re-election in February.
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- The former general also increasingly suffers from perceptions
by Israelis across the political spectrum that he has failed to come up
with a realistic strategy for lasting peace, beyond tactics to keep the
conflict on a low boil.
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- The new poll reported that 62 percent of Israelis believed
Israel should evacuate most settlements for a permanent peace.
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- Tens of thousands of Hamas supporters, some of them masked,
armed militants, rallied in two Gaza refugee camps Friday to mark 16 years
since the Muslim militant group's founding.
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- Vowing new suicide bombings in Israel, organizers shouted
through loudspeakers: "Our fighters will continue to blow themselves
up in the depths of the Zionist entity." (Additional reporting by
Nidal al-Mughrabi)
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