Israel Calls Unilateral Cease-Fire in Conflict

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon directed his defense minister Tuesday to cease fire in Israel’s eight-month confrontation with the Palestinians, hours after telling the nation that it is up to the Palestinians to stop shooting first.

Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer issued a statement shortly before midnight in Israel saying he had ordered the army “to cease fire and to follow regulations for opening fire that are activated when lives are endangered.”

Ben-Eliezer also called on the Palestinian leadership “to immediately halt violent actions as a first step back toward the negotiating table.”

The Israeli move came after Sharon, in a televised address to the nation, said it was the Palestinians who started the fighting and it is they who must stop it.

“I call tonight for a total truce in the area, and I say again here that if the Palestinians accept this proposal to stop the fire, we will immediately stop the fire,” he said.

Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin could not explain why the prime minister had not announced the unilateral cease-fire during his broadcast speech and news conference. The order, Gissin said, means that “we’re giving it our best shot by not firing one shot. We will only respond to fire when or if citizens or soldiers have been fired on. Practically, it means we won’t initiate any actions.”

What was unclear was how much that will change the reality on the ground. For months before Sharon took office in March, Israel said its troops were acting only in self-defense, but scores of Palestinians died in confrontations in which they were a poor match for soldiers. Under Sharon’s leadership, the army has initiated a far greater number of offensive actions--including the targeted killings of suspected Palestinian field commanders--and has regularly entered Palestinian-controlled areas.

Gissin said those operations would halt, but he could not say how long Israel will hold to its new defensive posture if the Palestinians fail to respond with their own cease-fire.

A senior Palestinian official, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, dismissed the proposal, calling Israel the aggressor. “We reject everything Sharon said about a cease-fire,” Abdel Rahman told the Associated Press.

But in Washington, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer welcomed Sharon’s call. Fleischer said it is vital that “the parties in the region unequivocally speak out and call for a cessation of the violence.” President Bush would “welcome a similar statement” from Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, he said.

Earlier in the evening, however, after Sharon spoke, Palestinian officials immediately denounced his statement as evidence that Israel has no real intention of implementing the recommendations issued Monday by an international commission led by former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell. The Palestinian response underscored the tough task U.S. and European peace envoys now in the region face as they try to build momentum from the commission’s report toward stopping the bloodshed.

The prime minister rejected the commission’s call for Israel to freeze construction of Jewish settlements as a confidence-building measure. In response to a question, he said that his government will neither build new settlements nor expropriate more Palestinian land but that it will continue to “provide for the ongoing requirements” of existing settlements.

“We certainly see no need to expropriate lands for the settlements. . . . There is enough land. In connection with that subject, I see no problem,” Sharon said.

Yossi Sarid, leader of the left-wing opposition in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, said after Sharon’s televised address that there was “nothing new” in what the prime minister was offering.

“I’m concerned,” Sarid said. “It is obvious that he has no real intention of accepting this report, since this cannot be done without completely freezing settlements.”

U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk and the consul general in Jerusalem, Ron Schlicher, met with Sharon for more than two hours late Monday night, after the Mitchell commission report was released, to “develop a framework and timetable for implementation” of its recommendations, a U.S. official said. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had already endorsed the report and urged the sides to immediately respond to its “clarion call” for an unconditional cease-fire.

But both the Bush administration and European envoys found Tuesday that each side remains entrenched in its position. Each says the other is to blame for the ongoing violence and must be the first to move to end it.

The Mitchell commission report calls for the two sides first to stop fighting. After an unspecified cooling-off period, they are to take steps to build mutual confidence, resume security cooperation and finally head back to the negotiating table. Powell appointed the U.S. ambassador to Jordan, William Burns, as his special envoy charged with winning Palestinian and Israeli acceptance of the report’s recommendations.

Early Tuesday, Palestinian officials called for Israel first to make confidence-building gestures--ranging from a settlement freeze to pulling its troops back from population centers and lifting the siege of Palestinian towns--before they rein in gunmen.

“First of all, we are the victims, we are suffering, we are facing this Israeli occupation,” the head of Palestinian security in the West Bank, Jibril Rajoub, told a news conference at his headquarters in the city of Ramallah. “The first step should come from the Israelis.”

Rajoub spoke just 48 hours after Israeli tank shells had struck his Ramallah home, wounding three of his bodyguards.

Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erekat echoed Rajoub’s sentiment in an interview with CNN after Sharon’s news conference, blasting the Israeli leader for failing to deal with the Mitchell commission’s recommendations as a single package.

Erekat said the Palestinian Authority wants a summit convened of U.S., European, Israeli and Palestinian leaders to work out a way to implement the Mitchell report.

Meanwhile, despite the flurry of diplomatic activity, fighting continued Tuesday. Shortly after Sharon spoke, an Israeli woman was wounded in the southern Jerusalem suburb of Gilo by shots fired from the nearby Palestinian town of Beit Jala in the West Bank.