Israeli Prime Minister Explores Variations on Gaza Withdrawal

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon met with government officials Tuesday to come up with a new version of his Gaza Strip pullout plan after the original was overwhelmingly rejected by members of his party.

Some Israeli news reports said Sharon was considering a much smaller withdrawal limited to three Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and two or three others in the West Bank. His original proposal, defeated in Sunday’s referendum among members of his Likud Party, envisioned abandoning all 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank.

But a senior government official dismissed those reports as speculative, saying Sharon was just beginning to explore variations on his plan.

“The prime minister has not made up his mind yet,” said the official, who requested anonymity. “There are various ideas.”

The parliament, or Knesset, took up the issue late Tuesday, but the discussion was largely a postmortem on the referendum.

During meetings aimed at sketching out alternatives to his defeated plan, Sharon assured Justice Minister Tommy Lapid on Tuesday that he intended to pursue some version of the proposed evacuation, Lapid told reporters afterward.

Lapid belongs to the centrist Shinui Party, which has threatened to bolt from the governing coalition if there is not enough progress toward peace. Analysts say Shinui, the largest of Likud’s partners, could prove a formidable counterweight to right-wing opponents of withdrawal by threatening to topple the coalition.

Lapid called for renewed negotiations with the Palestinians.

Shinui leaders have urged Sharon to ignore the Likud vote, which they say reflected the views of a tiny minority out of step with the sentiments of the Israeli public.

Sharon’s proposal was defeated by a 3-2 margin in the Likud referendum. Only about half of the party’s nearly 200,000 members participated, and polls have shown strong support for such a pullout among the public as a whole.

Lapid said after the meeting Tuesday that Sharon agreed to have the plan discussed at the Cabinet meeting Sunday. No vote is planned. The justice minister said his party would remain in the government.

“My impression from talking to the prime minister this morning was that he is determined to pursue the peace process,” Lapid said. “The work on the formula and the wording could take a number of weeks, but it will be very clear whether the situation we’ll be in will be a dynamic one or a frozen one.”

Others have called for a national referendum or a reshuffling of the government to get the withdrawal passed.

Sharon aides said the press of developments might prompt him to cancel a planned visit to Washington this month during which he was expected to meet with President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Sharon also was to attend a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a prominent lobbying group.

Likud’s rejection of Sharon’s plan was a setback for the Bush administration, which offered its endorsement last month in an effort to help the prime minister win approval.

As part of that agreement, the administration recognized Israeli claims to several large settlement blocs in the West Bank and declared that Palestinians who fled or were expelled from homes when the Jewish state was created in 1948 would have to resettle in an eventual Palestinian state rather than in Israel.

The American assurances to Israel sparked widespread anger among Palestinians and Arab countries.

In other developments, two Palestinians were killed and more than 20 were wounded by Israeli missile fire during an overnight incursion into the Khan Yunis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. One of the Palestinians was identified as a fighter in his 20s; the other was a 17-year-old bystander, Palestinian hospital officials said.