Jewish settlers and a group of Palestinian farmers engaged in stonethrowing clashes in the northern West Bank on Thursday, a Palestinian official and the Israeli army said.
The incident took place on a road which runs between the hardline Itamar settlement and the nearby village of Aqraba that are about five kilometres (three miles) apart. “Five farmers who herd sheep in the Jordan Valley were coming home to Aqraba on a tractor when settlers from Itamar started firing in the air,” said Rashid Fahmi, head of Aqraba village council.
“They attacked them, then they started throwing rocks at each other until the army came and arrested the five Palestinians.” A military spokeswoman confirmed the arrests but said the stone-throwing clashes had broken out following a car crash on the road between the settlement and the village.
“Two Israeli citizens were hurt during the clash and were evacuated to a hospital and five Palestinians were arrested,” she said. The Palestinians on Thursday expressed frustration over the peace Quartet’s latest statement and insisted the settlement issue was central to resolving the conflict with Israel. Top officials from the Middle East Quartet, representing the European Union, United States, Russia and United Nations, met Wednesday in Washington to address ways of hauling the two parties back to direct talks which ran aground 18 months ago. But the meeting ended with a bland statement urging both sides to focus on “positive efforts” to bring about a resumption of direct talks. Speaking to AFP, senior Palestinian official Nimr Hammad said the statement should have been “stronger and more assertive.” “They know that the main obstacle facing peace in our region is settlement activity,” said Hammad, who is political adviser to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas. “Israel has ignored all previous Quartet statements and the Quartet is aware of that, but asking the Palestinian side to get back to negotiations isn’t leading to a solution and peace in the region,” he said.
“What we need is to clearly ask Israel to stop its settlements which are the obstacle to negotiations and regional peace.” Senior PLO official Hanan Ashrawi took a much harder line, saying the Quartet statement, which made no reference to Israel’s ongoing occupation of the territories, demonstrated “a lack of will” to establish a Palestinian state. “Unfortunately, the Quartet did not propose any specific policy measures or means of engagement required to create a breakthrough in the current crisis,” she said in a statement. “The real issue is not ‘negotiations’ but rather ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land,” Ashrawi said.
“The glaring absence of any reference to this occupation portrays a lack of will to bring an end to it and to establish a viable Palestinian state.” Wednesday’s statement expressed support for next week’s meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian premier Salam Fayyad, but made only a passing mention of “continued settlement activity” at the very end of the document. “The Quartet welcomed plans for dialogue between the parties,” it said of the rare meeting at which Fayyad is to hand Netanyahu a letter from Abbas outlining his conditions for a resumption of talks, when they meet in Jerusalem on April 17.
