FREE DAILY EMAIL

Isra el and the Palestinians both appeared eager yesterday to prevent back-to-back Palestinian suicide attacks from becoming the trigger for a total breakdown of the US-backed roadmap for peace.

A top Palestinian minister urged hardliners to continue their adherence to a six-week-old truce which was punctured by Tuesday's attacks while Israeli officials said they also wanted to avoid an escalation of violence.

But Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned that the peace process would be dead in the water if the Palestinian authorities failed to make progress in dismantling militant organisations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

"What the Palestinian Authority lacks is not people. It's the will," he told the French newspaper Le Figaro.

"Nothing has been done to attack the roots of terrorism," commented Sharon, adding that more and more Palestinians now realise that it is "impossible to defeat Israel through terror".

One Israeli was killed and around ten wounded Tuesday in a suicide attack at a shopping mall in Rosh Ha-Ayin near Tel Aviv.

Another was killed in an almost simultaneous suicide attack outside the West Bank Jewish settlement of Ariel.

The first attack was claimed by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a radical offshoot of the mainstream Fatah, and the second by Hamas.

Both bombers came from a refugee camp in Nablus where an Israeli army raid on Friday left four Palestinians and an Israeli soldier dead.

Tuesday's attacks were described as pure acts of retaliation.

Hamas insisted yesterday that the so-called "hudna," or truce remained intact, although it reserved the right to respond to Israeli "aggression".

"The operation which took place yesterday will not affect the ceasefire," Hamas political leader Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi said.

"Our commitment to the ceasefire does not mean we will not respond to the crimes of the occupation.

This operation came as a natural revenge against the occupation crimes but we continue our commitment to the ceasefire".

A spokesperson for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade stressed the group had never signed up to the truce, but said the shopping mall attack should be "considered a reaction to the murder and arrests of the Israelis, especially the murder that took place at the Askar camp" in Nablus.

Palestinian security minister Mohammed Dahlan said that militant groups would merely play into the hands of the Israelis if they broke off the truce they unilaterally declared on June 29.

"Stopping the truce is following Sharon's agenda in continuing the cycle of violence initiated by the Israeli government," he said in a statement.

A senior Israeli official said that, despite the heightened tensions, Sharon could meet his Palestinian counterpart Mahmud Abbas next week.

"Israel is still committed to the peace process and wants to avoid an escalation of violence," the source close to Sharon said.

Israel was also looking to the international community to bring pressure to bear on the Palestinian Authority to dismantle the "terrorist infrastructure" of the hardliners, the aide added.

Abbas held talks yesterday in the Jordanian capital Amman with the top US diplomat for the region, Assistant Secretary of State William Burns.

Burns said that Washington was determined to seek the implementation of the roadmap, which was launched at a summit in Jordan on June 4, despite the recent escalation of violence.

"The US is committed to the peace in the Middle East and determined to implement the roadmap," Burns told reporters.

"I stressed to him (Abbas) President Bush's very firm personal determination to move ahead to implement the roadmap," he said.

"The terrorists cannot win, terror must be stopped".

The peace process has made stuttering progress in the ten weeks since the launch of the roadmap at the summit attended by Sharon, Abbas and Bush.

The Israelis pulled back their forces from much of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Bethlehem six weeks ago but have not handed over control to the Palestinians in any areas since then.

Only around 350 of the estimated 6 000 Palestinians in Israeli jails have been freed so far and plans to release another 69 on Tuesday were suspended in the light of the twin attacks.

Israel also demolished five Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem Thursday, which they said had been illegally constructed in the first such operation since the truce.

The army also dynamited the Nablus home of the family of the suicide bomber behind the Rosh Ha-Ayin attack.

The one-storey house had been home to ten people. – Sapa-AFP.

SPONSORED BY

Advanced