Israeli and Palestinian officials, bracing for a new escalation in violence, looked yesterday to the US to salvage a peace plan left in tatters by the collapse of a shaky truce.
Both sides launched appeals to Washington to stem the latest outbreak of bloodshed that has halted implementation of a US-sponsored peace roadmap aimed at establishing a Palestinian state by 2005.
The Americans stepped up their pressure on the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which it blames for the continued carnage, widening a freeze on the movement's assets and targeting sources of support.
The US also planned to dispatch senior officials, including US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, to the region to bolster ongoing talks by US chief peace monitor John Wolf.
Israelis and Palestinians blame each other for the latest cycle of violence capped this week by a suicide bombing that killed 20 passengers on a Jerusalem bus and a retaliatory Israeli airstrike on a Hamas leader.
A relative calm settled on the region yesterday but both sides saw Washington as key to avoiding another spiral of tit-for-tat attacks.
"The whole situation is dependent on the Americans," Nabil Abu Rudeina, a close aide of Yasser Arafat, said a day after the Palestinian leader chaired a new crisis meeting at his West Bank base in Ramallah.
"They should come out with a serious and decisive position to put an end to the Israeli escalation and violations," Abu Rudeina said. "It is a very dangerous situation. The Americans need to intervene."
Dov Weissglas, chief of staff for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, also urged US help at a meeting on Friday with US envoys here and in a phone call with US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Israeli public radio said.
It said Weissglas reiterated the need for the US to pressure Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmud Abbas to disarm and dismantle the radical groups and try those suspected of violence.
US officials have expressed alarm at the dramatic deterioration of the situation in the past two weeks after the truce declared on June 29 started out promisingly with a sharp reduction in the death toll.
Scrambling to find a formula for restoring peace they turned this week to Arafat, whom they had shunned for more than a year, and urged him to hand over control of all Palestinian security forces to Abbas to fight the militants.
A senior Palestinian official said that Arafat thought a new truce was possible if the Israelis formally recognized it, pulled out of occupied towns and ended their practice of "targeted killings" of militant leaders.
Armitage said on Friday he would visit the Middle East next month to "touch base" with officials in several Arab nations, and a more senior US official might also travel to the region in the coming weeks.
US President George W. Bush pledged on Friday to stay personally involved in the peace process and announced a widening of the US campaign against Hamas, which with Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for Tuesday's suicide bombing.
"If people want there to be peace in the Middle East, if the Palestinians want to see their own state, they've got to dismantle the terrorist networks," Bush said.
He said his government, which had previously frozen the assets of Hamas elements operating in the United States, would now target six senior Hamas officials abroad and five organizations accused of helping the group.
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant