Barak delivers poll surprise

JERUSALEM - Embattled Prime Minister Ehud Barak has set Israel on course for general elections next year, gambling his job on progress in Middle East peace moves and curbing a Palestinian uprising.

Barak said yesterday that he was ready for elections within months, in what analysts saw as a pre-emptive strike against rivals trying to oust him over his handling of an uprising in which more than 280 people, mostly Palestinians, have died.

The former Army general told startled parliamentarians that he was ready to go the polls only half way through his four-year term, adding later that he assumed elections would take place in six to nine months.

"You want elections. I am ready for elections, general elections for Prime Minister and the Knesset [parliament]," said Barak in a feisty speech interrupted by hecklers.

Barak, aged 58, will remain in office until the vote is held, and will still be in a position to seek a peace deal with Palestinians that might help him secure re-election.

Observers said May was a likely month for an election. Barak was elected in May last year.

He defended his Government's record in trying to end the Arab-Israeli conflict and said in effect that he, and no one else, was the man to revive and complete peace efforts.

"We will fight the violence because it won't solve anything," he said in a television interview. "The solution in the end will be negotiations.

"The Right does not have an alternative, not to what we are doing in war and not to what we will do in peace."

The conflict brought further bloodshed yesterday.

Israeli soldiers killed a 17-year-old Palestinian youth near the Karni crossing on the Gaza-Israel border.

The Army said soldiers fired at Palestinians who set off a roadside bomb as an Israeli car passed by.

A 14-year-old Palestinian boy also died yesterday of wounds sustained in earlier clashes. The deaths took the toll of fatalities in two months of violence to 283.

The Israeli Army yesterday reported shooting at its positions in several parts of the Gaza Strip and at Army bases and Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

It said its troops returned fire in instances where they could identify the sources of the shooting. There were no reports of casualties.

Barak, who is also defence minister, made his announcement to undercut opposition-inspired moves by Parliament to start gradual procedures for calling an early election.

The chamber later approved the first of three readings of a bill to dissolve itself and call elections, but Barak had already stolen the initiative from his rivals.

Barak lost his parliamentary majority just before the Camp David peace summit with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in July and has since been trying to forge a broad coalition government in an attempt to hold on to power.

He is staking a lot on the peace moves at a time when the outlook for reconciliation has rarely looked bleaker.

Opinion polls indicate that support for a peace deal remains high among Israelis.

But they suggest that Barak would lose any immediate election against potential right-wing challenger Benjamin Netanyahu, his predecessor as Prime Minister, and that he would face a struggle against another rival, Ariel Sharon.

Analysts said Barak's political survival now depended more closely than ever on progress in peacemaking.

- REUTERS

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