Sharon Seeks to Shore Up His Coalition, Sell Gaza Withdrawal

Smarting from a symbolic loss in Israel’s parliament, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Tuesday explored ways to stabilize his tottery coalition while pushing a controversial plan to remove Israeli settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip.

Sharon and representatives were holding or planning talks with leaders of opposition factions, including the left-leaning Labor Party, in hopes of expanding the governing coalition, which lacks a parliamentary majority.

Sharon sent Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz to meet with Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Shas, an opposition religious party.

The prime minister may not have to broaden his government before Oct. 25, when he intends to present to the parliament, or Knesset, his plan for evacuating the Gaza Strip.

Despite fierce resistance to the pullout among hard-liners within his conservative Likud Party and among rightist religious factions, the plan is expected to gain Knesset approval with help from the Labor and leftist parties.

Sharon suffered a setback Monday when the Knesset inaugurated its autumn session by voting not to accept the terms of his opening speech, which included an overview of the Gaza pullout. The 53-44 vote carried no legal weight, however.

Opponents of the evacuation plan, which calls for removing all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four others in the West Bank by the end of next year, are urging a nationwide referendum on the proposal. Sharon rejected that idea again Tuesday, according to Israeli media.

Some opposition politicians have called for early elections to pick a new government.

Nonetheless, Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he expected Sharon to stick with plans to get the evacuation approved by the Knesset.

“The question which is currently on the agenda is whether we should enter a stupid months-long elections campaign now, only to end up in the very same situation we are in today, or whether we should create the waves which would allow the prime minister to implement the historic decisions he is leading,” Olmert told Israel Radio.

Sharon, who suspended the search for new coalition partners when the Knesset went on recess in August, is expected to resume talks with Labor, though rebellious Likud members have tried to foil such an alliance.

Also Tuesday, a car bomb exploded outside a Palestinian police headquarters in Gaza City as a convoy was carrying Moussa Arafat, the top security official in the Gaza Strip and cousin of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Moussa Arafat, the apparent target, was not injured. He was appointed head of security in July, a move that angered Palestinian critics who saw him as a symbol of corruption.

In other developments Tuesday:

* Israel’s top military officer told a Knesset committee that the fatal bombings last week on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula probably were planned over 18 months to two years and financed by extremist Sunni Muslim groups, Israeli media reported.

The army’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, repeated Israeli assertions that the attacks at a Hilton hotel in the border town of Taba and two other Sinai sites popular among Israeli tourists probably were the work of Al Qaeda.

Yaalon said the bombings, which killed about three dozen people, were unlike attacks by Palestinian militants from the West Bank, the media reports said.

* United Nations officials said an 11-year-old girl was struck in the chest by gunfire from an Israeli military position as she sat in a U.N. classroom in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in southern Gaza.

The girl, Ghadeer Jaber Mokheimer, was hospitalized and in stable condition, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. The agency said two bullets were fired from an Israeli position near a bloc of Jewish settlements and one hit the child.

Israeli military sources said troops fired at a spot from which militants had launched mortar rounds at the army post and nearby Jewish communities. The sources said the army was investigating the reports that a civilian was wounded.

* The Israeli army said it erred two weeks ago when it said that a videotape shot from an unmanned drone over the Gaza Strip showed militants putting a Kassam rocket into a United Nations ambulance. U.N. officials denied the charge, saying the object probably was a stretcher. The military said it may not have been a rocket.