JERUSALEM -- A senior PLO leader said Wednesday that the Palestinian Authority must suspend peace negotiations with Israel unless Jewish settlers stop expanding their enclaves in the occupied West Bank.
Asked by Israel Radio if the PLO should withdraw from the talks over the settlement issue, rapidly emerging as among the thorniest dividing the two sides, Palestinian Authority member Yasser Abed Rabbo said, "This is the least that should be done, from my point of view."
Abed Rabbo's comments came as Israeli troops clashed with Arabs over a new settlement near the village of Kufr al-Deek in the West Bank. About 200 Palestinians tried to break through an army roadblock outside the village to reach a new building site near the settlement of Alei Zahav, witnesses said. A photographer was wounded after being hit by a rock, apparently thrown by a protester, and Israeli soldiers hurled a percussion grenade at the angry crowd.
On Tuesday, Jewish settlers had triggered a fresh controversy between the PLO and Israel when they staked a claim to a hilltop site in the northern part of the West Bank.
Settlers at the Elkana enclave sent bulldozers to uproot olive trees and strung barbed wire around land that Palestinians in the nearby al-Zawiya village said belonged to them.
Palestinians have long viewed the settlements, where more than 100,000 Israelis live among a million Palestinians in the West Bank, as a provocation.
The PLO, which took charge of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho in May under a 1993 peace deal, has said settlement expansion could wreck delicate negotiations over Israeli redeployment of troops in the rest of the West Bank. Talks on that issue and the problem of Palestinian elections are already stalled.
Abed Rabbo said the new expansion was pushing the peace process to a dead end. "I think that this is the end of the road; either all these activities should stop and the settlers withdraw from the occupied and confiscated land or the Palestinian Authority will have to take serious and decisive decisions," he said.
Israel Radio said military authorities in charge of the West Bank had ordered Elkana leaders to stop work. Settlers said they already stopped work on the site Tuesday evening.
PLO official Nabil Shaath said Tuesday the Palestinians had asked U.S. diplomats in Jerusalem "to intervene immediately to stop the settlements" and that PLO leader Yasser Arafat had also contacted the U.S. administration.
As Israel and the Palestinians wrangled over settlements, Israeli warplanes fired rockets on suspected Shiite Moslem bases in south Lebanon for a second straight day, killing one suspected guerrilla, security sources said. Two Israeli soldiers and three Lebanese were also killed in the raid. The attack was in retaliation for guerrillas assaults, which had also sparked heavy artillery duels across the south, the sources said.
The scope of the reprisal attacks in the past two days indicated that the Israelis may have adopted a new strategy in confronting assaults by Iranian-backed Moslem militants of Hezbollah and Syrian-based radical Palestinian factions opposed to Middle East peace.
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