PALESTINIAN leaders have voiced concern that US President Bill Clinton's legal problems will weaken his ability to pressure Israel in the stalled Middle East peace process.
"Obviously, we have been paying the price of a besieged administration incapable of taking bold decisions in the peace process," said Hanan Ashrawi, who until last month served in the Palestinian cabinet. "The peace process has been paying the price of a shaken president and the diversion of attention."
Mohamed Sobeih, Palestinian representative at the Arab League, told Rasha Saad that what was needed now was a greater international role in regional peace-making. "Egyptian and Palestinian officials are meeting to encourage a greater international role to prevent the region from falling into despair and extremism," he said.
Sobeih singled out the European Union and the UN Security Council as the two bodies that should take responsibility. "The EU and the Security Council should interfere; otherwise, the whole region will be on the brink of a volcano," he said.
Waste of time
THE PALESTINIAN Authority rejected Israel's latest offer to comply with the US proposal to withdraw from 13 per cent of the West Bank and transfer it to Palestinian control saying it was inconsistent with the interim peace accords. Talking to reporters after returning from his meeting with President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said talks with Israel were a waste of time.
Ariel Sharon, Israel's infrastructure minister and a powerful voice in the ruling coalition, suggested on Tuesday that Israel would handover 10 per cent of West Bank land to Palestinian control and turn the remaining three per cent into a nature reserve. Palestinian negotiators refused to accept any changes to the US initiative.
Air raids
ISRAELI warplanes hit suspected Hizbollah targets in Iqlim Al-Touffah in south Lebanon yesterday after the group detonated a roadside bomb, killing an Israeli soldier and wounding three, Reuters reported.
The bomb, planted on the edge of Israel's self-proclaimed security zone in south Lebanon, exploded while the soldiers were on patrol. Close fighting with automatic weapons and RPG rockets then erupted between Hizbollah fighters and the Israeli soldiers.
The roadside bomb raised to 10 the number of Israeli soldiers killed and to 78 the number wounded in south Lebanon since the start of the year.
Top secret
FOUR people have been killed and 25 injured in a series of accidents at a top secret laboratory near Tel Aviv that reportedly houses Israel's biological and chemical weapons programme, Israeli newspaper Maariv said yesterday.
Citing a report to be published today in the London-based newsletter Foreign Report, the paper claimed that in one of the incidents at the Biological Institute in Nes Ziona, security forces were on the verge of evacuating the town's 25,000 residents, but refrained after the centre's scientists said the danger had passed.
AFP reported that the activities of the Nes Ziona laboratory are top secret and covered by Israel's military censorship regulations. Foreign press reports say the institute is the centre of Israel's chemical and biological weapons programme and provides unspecified services to the Defence Ministry as well as chemicals for agriculture.
