Peres throws hat in ring for PM

JERUSALEM - Three more Palestinians, including a 14-year-old, died in clashes yesterday as Nobel peace laureate Shimon Peres said he had decided to run for Prime Minister in Israel's coming election.

But Peres' candidacy rested on the as-yet-unpledged support of the left-wing Meretz Party and its 10 legislators.

By law, a candidate needs the endorsement of 10 members of Parliament from a single faction to get on the February 6 ballot.

"I reviewed the difficulties and decided to run because I believe that with my candidacy the chances of defeating the other side are greater," the 77-year-old former prime minister told reporters after meeting Meretz leader Yossi Sarid.

"I cannot present my candidacy without the support of Meretz - that is a constitutional and political fact."

Meretz's executive committee was due to convene today to consider backing Peres, a move that would turn the election into a race with Prime Minister Ehud Barak and leading hawk Ariel Sharon of the main opposition Likud Party.

Both Peres and Barak are members of the Labour Party but it has already nominated the current Israeli leader as its candidate.

Political commentators have said Peres, an architect of interim peace deals with the Palestinians, would portray himself as the candidate with the best chances of ending the 12-week-old Palestinian uprising and restarting peace talks.

In the Gaza Strip, Hani Youssef al-Sufi, aged 14, and Salman Zorob, 18, were killed during a fierce gun battle between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen in the Rafah district near the Egyptian border.

At least 40 other people were wounded. An Army spokesman said a crowd of about 300 Palestinian civilians came to watch the Rafah gun battle and people might have been hit by stray bullets.

In a separate incident, Palestinian hospital officials said soldiers guarding the Jewish settlement of Netzarim shot at a bus carrying emergency workers, killing Rifaat Feisal Abu Marzouk, 28, and wounding two others.

The Israeli Army said there had been no such incident.

At least 333 people, most of them Palestinians, have been killed in the uprising that erupted in late September, two months after a peace summit in the United States ended without an accord.

Palestinian President Yasser Arafat accused Israel of undermining a United States drive to revive peace talks by increasing the violence.

"This escalation is intended to completely destroy the peace process," he said upon returning to Gaza from Cairo where he met Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

US President Bill Clinton stepped back into Middle East peacemaking at a meeting with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators invited to Washington to break the cycle of deadly violence.

"I don't want to raise anybody's expectations. We're having very, very serious discussions. But at the same time, we're facing major difficulties and serious differences," Palestinian delegation leader Saeb Erekat said after talks at the White House with Clinton and Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami.

Ben-Ami was more optimistic: "These are very, very serious negotiations with a spirit that may lead to the conclusion of an agreement if we maintain the same spirit."

The peace talks, taking place a month before Clinton is due to leave office, were seen as a last-gasp effort to put peacemaking back on track.

A new opinion poll showed that Peres, Israel's leading dove, would have a better chance than Barak of beating Sharon.

Peres, awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with Arafat and then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for historic interim peace deals forged a year earlier, has been sidelined in Barak's Government, heading a minor ministry.

The opinion poll in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper found Peres would defeat Barak in a three-way race for prime minister, forcing a second Peres-Sharon round that Peres would win.

The poll predicted Barak would garner 18 per cent of the vote, Peres 29 per cent and Sharon 38 per cent in a first round of voting.

But in the second round, Peres would win 41 per cent of the vote compared with 39 per cent for Sharon.

Sharon is accused by Palestinians of sparking their uprising with a high-profile visit to a Jerusalem site revered by Muslims and Jews.

Barak appealed publicly on Wednesday to Peres to unite behind his re-election campaign.

Many political analysts say Barak cannot win without a peace treaty with the Palestinians to dangle before voters.

The analysts also have noted that Barak could face a hard time attracting the crucial Israeli-Arab vote after 13 members of the community were shot dead by police in protests that erupted at the start of the Palestinian uprising.

- REUTERS

Herald Online feature: Middle East

Backgrounder: Holy city in grip of past

Map

Middle East Daily

Arabic News

Arabic Media Internet Network

Jerusalem Post

Israel Wire

US Department of State - Middle East Peace Process