MIDDLE EAST: Apparently stung by unprecedented public criticism from his own army chief of staff, Israel's Defence Minister Mr Shaul Mofaz yesterday eased conditions for some Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, authorizing the renewal of public transport between West Bank cities and issuing 5,500 permits for Palestinians to enter Israel to work and trade.
According to an official statement, Mr Mofaz agreed to what were described as "humanitarian gestures" to coincide with the holy Muslim month of Ramadan. "We want to take every possible step in order to ease the plight of the Palestinian population," the minister himself had earlier told reporters.
However, he acted just hours after Israelis had woken up to a hail of criticism of government policy on the Palestinians in general, and Mr Mofaz's stance in particular, plastered across the front pages of the Hebrew dailies.
In a highly unusual public airing of such complaints, a "senior military source" was quoted as having lamented to a group of leading reporters that the government's relentless collective punishment of the Palestinians was proving counter-productive, with restrictions on movement destroying Palestinian agriculture, breeding growing hostility to Israel and raising support for terrorist organizations.
Israel was "sacrificing the strategic interest," the source said, "for the sake of tactical considerations." While the Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat was primarily responsible for the recent collapse of the PA government of prime minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the unnamed source went on, Israel had done too far little to help Mr Abbas.
To boost Mr Abbas's credibility, and his chances of putting a permanent halt to the armed intifada, said the source, Israel should have withdrawn more rapidly from West Bank cities and avoided a damaging public debate about "removing" Mr Arafat.
Mr Abbas's rise to power had represented a real opportunity to restore calm: the US was strongly involved and boosted by military victory in Iraq, the Palestinian public was "opposed to terror," but Israel made only "miserly" concessions, according to one newspaper account of the source's comments. Within hours, it had emerged that the "senior source" was none other than Chief of Staff, Gen Moshe Ya'alon, who succeeded Mr Mofaz in the position and is evidently frustrated that Mr Mofaz refuses to heed his advice on policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians.
The army's official spokeswoman hurried to issue a statement claiming that the remarks did "not constitute criticism of government policy," but rather reflected the ongoing dilemmas about how best to deal with a "complicated" reality.
That statement notwithstanding, Gen Ya'alon was most certainly protesting over government policy. At what was intended to have been his "off-the-record" briefing with the Israeli reporters, indeed, he had said he was speaking out precisely because he feared the government was about to repeat its mistakes with Mr Abbas in its dealings with the new PA Prime Minister Mr Ahmed Korei.
If Mr Korei were to fall, he was quoted as saying, Mr Arafat would be left as the "sole ruler" of the Palestinians. For his part, Mr Korei said yesterday that he was having "constructive" talks with Hamas and other extremist groups about an intifada ceasefire, and that they "welcomed" his efforts.
In Gaza, Israeli troops shot dead one man and wounded another when they entered a restricted area near the border with Israel. Near Jenin in the West Bank, gunmen from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades badly injured a doctor and wounded his wife in an attack.