Israeli-Palestinian talks break up in disagreement

A meeting of Palestinian and Israeli negotiators broke up in disagreement yesterday over Israel's refusal to free prisoners jailed for attacks, Israeli and Palestinian officials said.

Israel yesteray approved a troop pullback from West Bank cities and the release of 900 Palestinian prisoners, mostly members of President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement, held for minor security offences, among some 8,000 in jail for attacks on Israelis during a four-year-uprising.

A senior Israeli official said Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat, at a meeting with an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, rejected proposed Israeli gestures for a February 8 summit in Egypt due to the prisoner issue.

"They rejected the prisoner offer. They walked out," after two hours of talks, a senior Israeli official said. "I don't know what they expected."

Palestinian sources confirmed that they had rejected Israel's refusal to include prisoner jailed over attacks on Israelis in the list of 900 Israel proposes to free in the coming weeks.

Sources in Mr Sharon's office said the talks had reached a crisis, though officials on both sides did not rule out further negotiations.

Mr Sharon's aide, Dov Weisglass, had met with Mr Erekat in Tel Aviv to work out details for the Abbas-Sharon summit.

One source said the meeting had ended when Mr Weisglass told Mr Erekat - who asked Israel to free Palestinians jailed for attacks before a 1993 interim peace deal - that Israel "has no intention to change a decision against freeing any terrorists with blood on their hands."

Meanwhile, Palestinian gunmen wounded five Israelis, two of them soldiers, in two separate attacks yesterday in the occupied territories that shattered a two-week period of calm, the Israeli military said.

In the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian gunman attacked an Israeli checkpoint with grenades and gunfire, wounding two soldiers, an Israeli military source said.

Soldiers fired back at the gunman, killing him, Israeli media reported. Palestinian medics had no comment.

Jewish settlers said a Palestinian passer-by was also wounded in the incident at the Orchan junction, north of a Jewish settlement bloc in southern Gaza.

The soldiers were the first Israeli casualties in nearly two weeks of calm that has prevailed since Palestinian police have deployed to rein in militants in Gaza, under orders from the recently elected moderate Mr Abbas.

Israel also arrested a Palestinian teenager with a suspicious bag at Hawara checkpoint at the southern entrance to Nablus. He told troops he was carrying an explosives belt for a suicide attack, an Israeli military source said. Palestinian militant groups made no immediate comment.