JERUSALEM (Islamweb & News Agencies) - The United States is pressing Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to do more to translate into action his call for an end to violent Resistance attacks on Israelis.
Delivering the message in telephone calls on Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell also urged Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to be ready to respond to a crackdown by Arafat on Palestinian militants, the State Department said.
But the European Union's envoy to the Middle East gave a particularly gloomy assessment of Israeli-Palestinian relations after some 15 months of violence and more than 1,000 deaths.
``There is no trust. There is no confidence. There is no cooperation. There is no security work together and practically all the ties and contacts have been broken,'' the envoy, Miguel Angel Moratinos, told reporters in Jerusalem.
Nonetheless, Israeli Foreign Ministry officials and political sources told Reuters they were maintaining high-level contacts with Palestinian leaders despite a security cabinet decision last week that declared Arafat irrelevant.
And Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said Israel had no desire to topple the Palestinian Authority or harming Arafat.
``As a matter of policy, we will certainly not harm Yasser Arafat physically and we will not determine for the Palestinian people who its leader should be,'' Ben-Eliezer said in a speech.
At the State Department, spokesman Richard Boucher said Powell noted in his telephone conversation with Arafat that the Palestinians had taken ``some positive actions'' but ``there need to be more actions to make an effective end to violence.''
Under international pressure to act after a wave of Resistance bombings in Israel, Arafat has outlawed the military wings of Hamas and other groups and arrested dozens of militants.
Israel has accused Arafat of going after low-level activists rather than arrest the militants Israel most wants.