Thursday, May 01, 2008
Elder of ZiyonPalestinian militant factions agreed on Wednesday to a proposal for a truce with Israel that Egyptian mediators will now try to sell to the Jewish state, a senior Egyptian official said.No one in the media seems to have noticed the absence of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades of Fatah from these reports. The PA sent a representative but he was not an Al Aqsa member, and Al-Aqsa is quite at odds with the official PA/Abbas position on the use of terror.
The 12 groups meeting in Cairo agreed to the plan, already backed by Hamas and Fatah, for a "comprehensive, simultaneous and reciprocal period of calm to be applied progressively, first in Gaza and then in the West Bank," Egypt's MENA news agency said, without naming the official.
A deal for a six-month period of calm had already been accepted by the Islamist movement Hamas, while Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, from rival Fatah, on Sunday gave the negotiations unconditional support.
...The agreement of Islamic Jihad, which fires most rockets from Gaza into Israel, is seen as crucial for the deal. However, a spokesman for the group said they would respect a truce but not sign it if it applied only in Gaza.
Other factions at the Cairo talks include the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) as well as the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) and the Popular Struggle Front (PSF).
A good number of terror and rocket attacks out of Gaza are claimed by Al Aqsa. A barrage on Wednesday was claimed by them, and some on Tuesday were claimed by another Fatah-linked group not mentioned in the articles about the agreement, the Abu Ammar Brigades.
The "agreement" is worthless, but the apparent absence of major players - from the most prominent Palestinian Arab faction - shows that it is a joke as well.
