23 August 2006

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyya said Tuesday that a possible national unity coalition would be "open to all" during a meeting of his beleaguered Hamas-led Cabinet, as Israel continued its two-month old offensive against the Gaza Strip. "A national unity government will be open to all" parties, Haniyya said. "We are not imposing conditions."

But a top aide to President Mahmoud Abbas said Tuesday that the president will not form

any new coalition unless Hamas clearly accepts a political program that recognizes Israel.

Azzam al-Ahmad, head of Fatah's parliamentary bloc, told Reuters that such a deal would have to be "based on a clear and direct acceptance of the Arab Peace Initiative and Israeli-Palestinian peace deals."

A Hamas official in Gaza said that was not on the agenda.

"Fatah will never succeed in dragging us to recognize Israel," he said. "Let the economic siege remain ... We want to pursue resistance, that's our only option."

Fatah officials said that Abbas would tell the movement's leadership at a meeting in Jordan on Wednesday of his plan to push Hamas to accept his political program.

Senior Fatah official Nabil Amr said if Hamas did not agree, one option for Abbas would be to dissolve the government to appoint a caretaker administration of technocrats ahead of early presidential and parliamentary elections.

In the latest violence in a two-month old Israeli hunt for a kidnapped soldier, three Palestinian militants were shot dead by Israeli troops in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, a medical source said. The three men - all members of Islamic Jihad - were killed by Israeli tank fire near the village of Qarara, north of the town of Khan Younis, the Palestinian source said.

An Israeli military spokesman said that troops fired toward three Palestinians approaching the security fence near Kissufim in the southern Gaza Strip. He said the Palestinians were "carrying large bags and acting in a suspicious manner."

Israeli soldiers, backed by helicopter gunships, tanks and armored personnel carriers, also moved into Palestinian-controlled areas near the main Israel-Gaza cargo crossing on Tuesday, conducting house-to-house searches and arrests.

Five Palestinians were lightly wounded, medical officials said. Three Palestinians were arrested, security officials said.

The Israeli military confirmed an operation near the Karni crossing, but would not divulge its objectives. "They took two of my cousins and asked them about fighters, tunnels and many other issues," said farmer Ahmed Helles, 65, whose olive trees were uprooted by Israeli military bulldozers as part of the operation.

Separately, in southern Gaza, the Israeli Army moved into farmlands near the town of Khan Younis, firing machine guns into the fields after calling on farmers to evacuate the area, Palestinian security officials said. The Israeli Army had no immediate comment.

Meanwhile, an Israeli military court charged Palestinian Parliament Speaker Aziz Dweik on Tuesday with "belonging to a terrorist organization," two weeks after his abduction in the West Bank.

Dweik was also charged with being speaker of the Palestinian Parliament while representing a terrorist organization and "taking part in activities on behalf of a terrorist organization," said one of his lawyers, Osama al-Saadi.

Addressing himself to journalists, the 58-year-old Dweik said Israel had no right to put him on trial and charged that he was being held in "extremely difficult conditions."

Israel abducted more than 60 elected Hamas officials, including a third of the Cabinet and 26 MPs, after the group's military wing claimed joint responsibility for the capture of an Israeli soldier in a deadly commando raid on June 25.

And in the latest complication for the struggling Palestinian government, public sector workers plan an open-ended strike if they do not receive their long overdue wages, the head of the employees' union said on Tuesday.

Union chief Bassam Zakarneh said workers would hold a preliminary two-day strike starting on Wednesday. If the government fails to pay wages after that, an open-ended strike would begin on Sept. 2, he told Reuters. The strike would cover all government employees, estimated to total 165,000, including school teachers and healthcare workers, he said.

A US-led aid and banking boycott has prevented the government from paying salaries since March.

"We will not come back [to work] until our demands are met," Zakarneh said. "We gave the government six months to solve this issue. I think the six-month period is more than enough." - Agencies