The Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, yesterday remained adamant that he would not accept any of Israel's suggestions for alterations to the Wye River land-for-security accord. Nor would he accept Israel's timetable for the long-overdue implementation of the US-brokered deal, signed last October.
"No, until now we didn't accept it," Mr Arafat said when asked by reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah about Israeli press reports, which intimated that he was amenable to a partial delay in the execution of the deal on condition that the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, agreed to a detailed timetable for the carrying out of Wye.
"What we are accepting," he said, "is what has been mentioned in the Wye River agreement and signed at the White House under President Clinton's supervision." Mr Arafat's comments followed the latest meeting on Wednesday between Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams set up two weeks ago in an effort to hammer out a timetable for the implementation of the Wye deal. This includes three land handovers to the Palestinians amounting to 13.1 per cent of the West Bank.
The two sides are deadlocked not only over the timetable - Israel has said it will begin to implement the next troop redeployment on October 1st, but the Palestinians say that's too late - but also over Mr Barak's efforts to persuade Mr Arafat to delay the last of the three Wye withdrawals until final status talks between the two sides begin.
After a period of initial optimism following Mr Barak's election, the Israel-Syria track also seems to be faltering. The Syrian official daily Tishrin yesterday accused Israel of creating obstacles to renewing negotiations between the two sides, which broke off more than three years ago.
The paper condemned the Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr David Levy, who after a meeting on Tuesday with King Abdallah of Jordan, called on President Hafez al-Assad of Syria to enter into unconditional, direct negotiations with Israel rather than talks through third-party mediators.
Israel, the Syrian paper said, was holding up the resumption of talks by insisting on direct negotiations. Syria has demanded that Israel agree to withdraw from the strategic Golan Heights as a precondition for the restart of talks. The latest Syrian media outburst follows on the heels of a recent decision by the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, to delay a scheduled mid-August visit to the region which was aimed at getting the two sides back to the negotiating table. Ms Albright, who postponed her visit because of the dispute on the Israel-Palestinian track, now plans to be in the region in early September.
Meanwhile, two Israelis were released yesterday from a Greek Cypriot jail after serving only five months of a three-year term in a spy case. The surprise decision by President Glafcos Clerides of Cyprus to grant clemency to Udi Hargov (37) and Igal Damari (49) follows strong pressure by Israel on the Cypriot government.
After being freed, Hargov and Damari, both agents of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, immediately flew back to Israel. In what was seen as an effort to explain the move in the face of internal criticism, the Cyprus govern
ment said the clemency decision was a goodwill gesture to the newly-elected Israel Prime Minister, Mr Barak, in turn, said that the pardons would "contribute to promoting the good neighbourly relations" between Israel and Cyprus.
The two Israelis were arrested last November near the town of Ziyi in southern Cyprus, and later pleaded guilty to approaching an off-limits military zone and to possessing unlicensed radio scanning equipment. In exchange for the guilty plea, the prosecution waived the more serious charge of espionage.