JERUSALEM (Islamweb & Agencies) - Palestinian President Yasser Arafat accused Israel on Saturday of escalating Middle East violence and called on world leaders at a Group of Eight summit to rein in Israeli ``aggression'' in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.The appeal capped a week of inter-communal violence between Israelis and Palestinians, locked in 10 months of bloodshed which a U.S.-brokered cease-fire has been unable to staunch.
``There is an Israeli attempt to continue escalating the situation. They assume that this escalation will be to their benefit, yet it is not...because it is now clear to the participants of Genoa that there is a serious Israeli escalation,'' Arafat told reporters at his Gaza headquarters.
In the latest violence in the West Bank on Friday, two explosions ripped through a house next to the office of Arafat's Fatah faction in the predominantly Palestinian city of Hebron, Al-Khalil killing one Palestinian and wounding at least three others.
Palestinian officials said Israeli troops had fired missiles targeting the Fatah office but had mistakenly hit the house.
Elsewhere in Hebron, Israeli security forces were investigating the roadside killing by Jewish militants of three Palestinians, including a three-month-old baby, near the divided city on Thursday.
Israeli War Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer grudgingly admitted that the attack amounted to Jewish terror which could spur heavy Palestinian retaliation.
Exchanges of fire were reported throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip overnight, including between the Jewish settlement of Gilo on the edge of Jerusalem and the Palestinian town of Beit Jala, where two Palestinians were wounded. (Read photo caption below).
CALLS FOR INTERNATIONAL INVOLVEMENTRussian Mideast envoy, Andrei Vdovin who met Arafat in Gaza Saturday reiterated an increasingly-heard call for international involvement in the troubled region after meeting Arafat, but stopped short of backing a Palestinian demand for an international monitoring force on the ground.
Foreign ministers of the Group of Eight leading countries, in Italy for a summit that began on Friday, have urged the two sides to accept ``third-party monitoring'' to help implement a truce-to-peacemaking plan outlined by an international panel.
On Friday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said ``it might be very useful to have monitors'' to help observe a proposed cooling-off period which is supposed to follow the cease-fire implementation.
Israel's War minister said that if it had no choice, Israel might allow U.S. officials to oversee the truce under an agreement for security coordination between Israeli, Palestinian and U.S. representatives.
PHOTO CAPTION:
An Israeli tank guards the Jewish settlement of Netzarim in Gaza Strip July 20, 2001. Suspected Jewish militants shot and killed three Palestinians, including a baby boy, prompting an urgent appeal from the Palestinian Authority for foreign observers in the West Bank and Gaza. (Suhaib Salem/Reuters)