Reuters: “Israel is likely to agree to hand control of the West Bank city of Jericho over to the Palestinians in the coming days, Israeli television reported on Monday.”
[…] Israel had promised to transfer five West Bank cities to Palestinian control in advance of a Feb. 8 peace summit in Egypt. But the handover has been delayed by disagreement over Palestinian demands to remove all roadblocks in the area.
[…] Israeli troops had reoccupied these cities during a more than four year Palestinian uprising that erupted after peace talks failed in September 2000.
The report came hours after Palestinian militant leaders in Cairo said they were ready to offer a formal cease-fire in their campaign against Israel in return for an Israeli timetable to withdraw from West Bank cities and to release prisoners.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rejected the truce bid saying he wants Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to disarm the militants rather than negotiate with them.
But Israel has also sought to encourage the moderate Abbas’s efforts to implement promised reforms and halt violence in the Palestinian territories as he hopes to coordinate his planned Gaza pullout this summer with the Palestinians.
The 3-cornered assault continues, in other words.
feh… Jericho is cursed anyways (Josh 6:26)
turing word: hotel – as in: don’t build a hotel in downtown Jericho, lest you be smitten by the Lord.
And the walls came tumbling down.
I ate lunch in Jericho, at an arab restaurant, when I was a student years ago. We had driven across the new Allenby bridge from Jordan, and it was our first meal break in the Holy Land. Memories… The place had great pastries, too.
But the best thing was that, instead of muzak, the restaurants and shops had hanging cages of songbirds.
They have regulations against playing anything that includes horns.
Funny, but Jericho was turned over in the original Oslo Accords as implemented by the Gaza Jericho Agreement. Palestinians have had civil administrative control over Jericho and its environs for most of the last 10 years, except when the Palestinians launched into Intifada 2: Arafat’s Cranial-Rectal Inversion.
Israel reasserted itself in those areas previously turned over because the Palestinians were completely unwilling to handle security matters.
So, this latest news is simply putting the Palestinians back in a position that they were in 10 years ago. It took 10 years, thousands of lives lost, and billions in the rabbit hole, and all the Palestinians got was Jericho (again).