Mideast Truce Effort Bruised

U.S. efforts to broker a Mideast cease-fire ahead of a key Arab summit suffered multiple blows Sunday as the latest round of negotiations failed to produce an agreement to halt 18 months of bloodshed.

Vice President Dick Cheney said he has no plans to return to the region for talks with Yasser Arafat, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon threatened to prevent the Palestinian Authority president from traveling to the Arab League summit in Beirut this week.

Meanwhile, violence continued Sunday, as two groups of Palestinian gunmen apparently infiltrated Israel from Jordan. By midnight, Israeli forces had killed nine Palestinians, and Palestinian gunmen had killed two Israelis.

Sunday night’s meeting of Israeli and Palestinian security officials with U.S. special envoy Anthony C. Zinni as referee had been seen as a make-or-break attempt to reach a cease-fire declaration. It was the fourth meeting in less than a week. The two sides reportedly remained far apart but agreed to study a “bridging proposal” presented by Zinni that was meant to narrow differences.

If Zinni’s cease-fire efforts collapse completely, the consequences could be dire. Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, chief of staff of the Israeli army, told an interviewer this month that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will drag on “for months or longer.”

Participants in Sunday’s meeting, including Arafat’s security chief for the Gaza Strip and the head of Israel’s domestic security service, emerged from the 3 1/2-hour session near Tel Aviv with nothing to announce. Officials said another meeting was scheduled for today.

Both Cheney and Sharon said a truce had to be in place before they would make what they saw as concessions to Arafat.

Sharon said Arafat’s ability to travel to the Beirut summit will depend on whether he can force Palestinian militants to refrain from attacking Israelis. Sharon, speaking in a weekly Cabinet session, added that he has seen no signs of that yet.

U.S. officials have asked Sharon to let Arafat go to the meeting, where the 22 members of the Arab League are expected to debate the outlines of a peace plan sponsored by Saudi Arabia that has stirred considerable interest among diplomats desperate to contain the blood-soaked Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Arafat “will not leave Ramallah as long as he does not act against the terror,” Sharon told his Cabinet. Ramallah is in the West Bank and is where Arafat has been virtually trapped by Israeli forces for nearly four months.

Sharon has also said that if he lets Arafat go to Beirut, he may not allow him to return to the West Bank, especially if violence continues at home and Arafat uses the summit to stir up anti-Israeli sentiment. In Sunday’s Cabinet session, Sharon disputed comments from his defense minister, who said violence actually has declined. The minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres are among those who argue that Arafat should be allowed to travel to Beirut.

A final decision will be made Tuesday or Wednesday, at the very last minute, aides to Sharon said.

“Israel wants to dictate its conditions to us, but they should know very well that this blackmail will not have any effect on our political decisions,” Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed-Rabbo said.

Cheney, meanwhile, said in Washington that he has “no immediate plans” to see Arafat. The vice president, touring the Middle East earlier this month, had held out the possibility of meeting Arafat in Egypt as a reward to the Palestinians for executing a cease-fire agreement.

Although Cheney did not rule out a future trip, he said it was particularly “unlikely” that he would fly to the region before Wednesday’s opening of the Arab League summit.

“So far, conditions on the ground have not warranted my going forward with the meeting,” Cheney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” referring to Arafat’s failure to clamp down on Palestinian militants or meet other U.S. terms.

It would take an eleventh-hour breakthrough by Zinni, a retired Marine Corps general, for the White House to rethink its position about sending Cheney back, U.S. officials added Sunday.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Sunday that the United States had informed Arafat on Friday that a meeting was not going to happen in “the next several days,” a further indication that no such breakthrough is expected.

Zinni has been working toward implementation of a truce accord negotiated last year by CIA Director George J. Tenet but never enacted. Israelis and Palestinians disagree over who should do what and when, and how long each phase should take. Zinni offered a compromise Sunday night, one participant said.

“We were given an American compromise document,” Mohammed Dahlan, the ranking security chief in the Gaza Strip, told reporters after the meeting. “We will study it and give our response to it in a meeting that will be held Monday. The Israelis were also given that same document.”

In Sunday’s Cabinet meeting, Sharon said Arafat had made no effort to stop violence that has raged unabated. But Ben-Eliezer disagreed, noting that the violence has ebbed slightly. In addition, Arafat has been meeting with leaders of numerous Palestinian factions since Thursday to tell them to curtail armed operations, according to participants.

Whether it has lessened or not, violence continued Sunday.

The Israeli army said Jordanian authorities detected a group of Palestinian gunmen attempting to cross into Israel. The Jordanians shot and killed two, but the others breached a fence and entered Israel. Troopers from Israel’s elite Egoz unit tracked their footprints across the Galilee region and found the men resting under a eucalyptus tree.

“One of them noticed us, so we opened fire,” said 1st Lt. Shani Hajbi, “and in the first round of fire, they were all killed.”

The gunmen were armed with Kalashnikovs, the army said, adding that they were probably going to attack a kibbutz on the eastern shores of the Sea of Galilee. Thousands of Israelis are flocking to the Galilee region for Passover vacation, which began this week. The kibbutz that authorities believed was the target was evacuated, and field trips throughout the verdant region were canceled.

Hours later, the army reported an infiltration around a settlement in the Jordan Valley that had come under attack in February.

Early Sunday, a 23-year-old Jewish settler traveling from her home to a settlement where she taught kindergarten was killed by fire from a passing car. The gunman fired on the armored bus in which Esther Kleinman was riding. The bullet apparently pierced a vulnerable portion of the windshield and struck her.

Israeli soldiers scouring Palestinian villages in the area in search of suspects killed a Palestinian police officer. Later, in the Gaza Strip, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian farmer because he got too close to a road used by settlers; the man was not armed. After nightfall, Israeli soldiers also shot dead three Palestinian gunmen who the army said were trying to penetrate a settlement in Gaza. They were later identified by Palestinians as members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia linked to Arafat’s Fatah movement.

And after 10 p.m., an Israeli driving near a settlement in the Hebron area of the West Bank south of Jerusalem was killed by a sniper.

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Wilkinson reported from Jerusalem and Wright from Washington.