Israeli, PLO Negotiators Renew Talks : Mideast: The parties are badly divided about how much territory the Palestinians will control. The Cairo meeting may be ‘the last chance to find a solution,’ a delegate says.

With time and opportunity running short for salvaging a peace agreement, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators returned to the table Monday still badly divided on how much territory the Palestinians will control when they raise the flag of autonomy in Jericho and the Gaza Strip.

Although Israel was said to have doubled the area it was prepared to turn over to Palestinian control in Jericho to 54 square kilometers, Palestinians were still demanding about four times that much and were skeptical about any major breakthroughs, at least until later in the week.

“Based on statements that have been made by high officials in Israel, I cannot expect any accomplishment in terms of narrowing the differences between us and the Israelis,” Said Kamel, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s ambassador to Egypt, said in an interview before the start of the talks in Cairo.

But senior PLO official Nabil Shaath, who had headed a previous round of talks in Cairo, said he was hopeful that the deadlock could be broken. “I think it’s the last chance to find a solution,” he said.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who flew in with an Israeli delegation for the closed-door talks, said PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat will have to be more realistic if there is any hope for the talks to succeed.

“I very much hope that Arafat comes down from that tree he’s climbed, because I am not bringing anything new with me,” Peres told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot.

“I go to Cairo with lots of goodwill in order to bring about the implementation of the principles of agreement out of respect for the Palestinians. But I am not bringing anything new,” Peres said.

But after his meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Amir Moussa in Cairo, Peres was more diplomatic. “We would like to supply the Palestinian partners with the most we can in the way of dignity and perception, so that they will be able to run their own lives,” he said.

“Let us not forget that the Palestinians will take an immediate responsibility for over one million people, and that is a serious responsibility.”

The negotiators failed to meet a Dec. 13 target date for concluding an agreement and commencing withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank town of Jericho and the Gaza Strip, the key features of a five-year period of Palestinian autonomy envisioned in a landmark declaration of principles signed in September.

In detailed talks over the last three months, the two sides have become bogged down in disputes over the size of the area around Jericho to be transferred to Palestinian control, security around Jewish settlements and control of international borders and crossing points--disputes that in many ways relate to how the two sides view the nature of the autonomy agreement and the ultimate status of the Israeli-occupied lands in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

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“The problem is not who controls the crossing points. It is a political dispute over whether this is an autonomy agreement or a first step toward a Palestinian state,” a senior Palestinian official told the Arabic-language press recently.

Israel’s housing minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, countered over the weekend that while “Yasser Arafat thinks that this is a process to establish a Palestinian state, we are talking only about a transitional period of autonomy to test whether coexistence is possible.”

During a summit with Arafat in Cairo on the eve of the Dec. 13 target date, Israeli Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin is said to have forcefully emphasized Israel’s insistence that it would not accept a strategy designed to symbolize Palestinian aspirations to statehood.

The PLO leader, in turn, made an emotional plea for help to salvage the agreement at a time when Palestinian disillusionment--both with the Gaza-Jericho accord and with Arafat’s ability to manage it--was growing deeper by the day.

The negotiations have been further plagued by growing rifts within the Palestinian camp. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Maazen), who masterminded the secret talks in Oslo that produced the ground-breaking September agreement, has been increasingly shut out of the implementation talks and was in an open dispute with Arafat over several issues related to the negotiations.

Those issues include the question of how quickly to demand release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.

But Abbas arrived in Cairo on Monday to head the Palestinian delegation, perhaps a signal that the PLO is trying to get the talks back on the smooth course they took in Norway.

Arafat flew to Cairo a day earlier for a quick meeting with Mubarak on Sunday night. Afterward, Foreign Minister Moussa said that officials are optimistic that an accord can be completed.

“There are still some obstacles that require further negotiations,” he said. “We hope that the forthcoming Cairo talks will surmount all stumbling blocks and the Palestinian-Israeli accord be implemented in letter and spirit.”

Diplomatic sources here said that any final agreement would likely be delayed at least until next week because of the difficult issues still to be resolved.

Both sides have given ground on the question of the Jericho area, with Israel doubling its initial offer of 27 square kilometers, which would have included only the city of Jericho and two surrounding refugee camps. But Kamel said the Palestinians find the new 54-square-kilometer offer “not good enough.”

Sources familiar with the talks say the problem is not just the size of the Israeli offer but its configuration. The 54 square kilometers (21.6 square miles) on offer are not contiguous and do not meet the Palestinians’ demand for access to the Dead Sea, these sources said.

The Palestinians have lowered their original demand for control of the entire district of Jericho, about 340 square kilometers, to about 200 square kilometers, sources said.

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Control of international borders, and especially border crossings from Jordan and Egypt, also remains a key stumbling block to the talks. Palestinians want an end to humiliating control procedures for Arabs entering the West Bank and Gaza; Israel insists on security control of the borders, not only for people entering Israel proper but also to guard against a rush of illegal Palestinian refugees flooding into the West Bank and Gaza.

Palestinians have proposed some sort of international presence on the frontiers to meet security concerns, a plan the Israelis have so far rejected. Now, the two sides are discussing various means of dual control that would meet Israel’s demand to guarantee security while also meeting the Palestinians’ wish to have their citizens free of direct Israeli monitoring at the borders--perhaps some form of electronic surveillance.

Rabin has said that Israel has no objection to having both Israeli and Palestinian monitors present at the border crossings, “as long as we are sure we can control, for the sake of security, everyone that crosses the border, and no additional people (will enter the territories) who are not entitled to be residents of the territories.”

But the two sides have been substantially deadlocked on the same issue for weeks, and even with a new round of talks last week in Oslo and Paris, “there’s no progress,” said one source close to the talks.

Still, he said, both sides realize they must conclude an accord soon--even one that perhaps pleases neither side: “There’s too much at stake.”