Israel to reopen Gaza, lift roadblocks

Tuesday’s meeting of Israeli and Palestinian leaders—while the first of its kind after four years of fighting—was only a modest first step since the truce they announced remains tenuous on the ground and core territorial disputes were sidestepped.

Underlining lingering tension, witnesses said a Palestinian man was critically wounded by gunfire from a Jewish settlement in occupied Gaza on Wednesday, while a Hamas militant was killed while preparing a bomb in a nearby town.

The Israeli Army, which has a garrison in the Atzmona settlement from which Palestinians said the shots were fired, said it was checking the report.

Militant groups said they were not bound by new President Mahmoud Abbas’s truce pledge made as a basis for starting talks on statehood, but they would continue to show restraint for now, and leaders of both sides sought to capitalise.

Israel’s Defence Ministry said an initial 1,000 workers and hundreds of traders from Gaza would be issued permits in the coming days to enter Israel, restoring an economic lifeline to the dusty, slum-ridden coastal territory that has been largely severed because of violence since 2000.

A senior Israeli official said Abbas and Sharon would probably meet again in about a week at the Israeli leader’s desert ranch. Their aides would have a series of meetings beforehand to agree an agenda focusing on security issues.

Among gestures Sharon promised in return for the quiet Abbas engineered—after he won a January 9 election as Yasser Arafat’s successor—are releases of Palestinian prisoners and a phased Israeli Army pullback in the West Bank.

Abbas said on Wednesday, Sharon had told him the Israeli Army would remove major roadblocks in the course of a promised retreat from five West Bank cities in the next few weeks. ‘‘We agreed that these withdrawals would be from areas and not just cities, meaning they will remove checkpoints ringing cities. We will then deploy our security forces there,’’ he said.

‘‘The idea is for Palestinians to assume security control over these areas we vacate. In some areas where we don’t think they will be strong enough to neutralise terrorists yet, we may hold on to our checkpoints but loosen the regime so people pass more freely,’’ a senior Israeli official said.

Israel intends to free an initial 900 prisoners out of a total 8,000, with the release of the first 500 next week. But Abbas wants many more out, including militants serving long terms for killing Israelis, to increase his leverage over the armed factions.

Abbas said the ceasefire should soon lead to ‘‘road map’’ negotiations yielding a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. —Reuters