MIDDLE EAST: Middle East mediators working to revive a stymied peace plan said last night that all final details of an agreement must be negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians.
Senior officials from the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations, meeting in New York, also said that any Israeli withdrawal from Gaza must be complete and end the Jewish state's occupation of the Palestinian territory.
However, President George Bush, under pressure from the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, to back his planned unilateral pull-out from Gaza, had said last month that Israel could not be expected to give up all its West Bank settlements or to accept the return of Palestinian refugees to what is now the Jewish state.
In apparent contradiction of this change in US policy, the quartet - comprising the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, the Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Sergei Lavrov, the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, and the EU foreign policy chief, Mr Javier Solana, along with the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, in his capacity as chairman of the EU's council of foreign ministers - said in their statement that "any final settlement on issues such as borders and refugees must be mutually agreed to by Israelis and Palestinians".
The Sharon withdrawal plan, rejected over the weekend by the membership of his ruling Likud party, "must lead to a full Israeli withdrawal and complete end of occupation in Gaza," the quartet's statement said.
Earlier, Mr Sharon took his first steps towards amending the Gaza pullout plan by holding consultations with cabinet ministers on a new blueprint. A senior Israeli official said Mr Sharon would try to push through his proposal, which originally called for the evacuation of all Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and four of 120 in the West Bank, with as few changes as possible.
Israeli newspapers reported he now envisaged that only three of the 21 Gaza settlements and two in the West Bank would go.
Mr Sharon met his Justice Minister, Mr Yosef Lapid, a senior coalition partner whose centrist Shinui party holds 15 seats in the 120-member parliament. Mr Lapid had threatened to take the party out of the government if the plan was dropped. - (Reuters)
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