It came after the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, caught the Palestinians and his own cabinet colleagues by surprise by announcing what his army described as a unilateral ceasefire. Officials were evasive about exactly what this meant, saying that troops would only open fire if they were shot at but declining to spell out whether it would bring an end to the army's wrecking missions into Palestinian territories or the use of F-16s to bomb targets. Pressed to explain the exact terms, Lt-Col Olivier Rafovitch, a spokesman for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), said it "could be understood" there would be no more assassinations.More than 30 Palestinians have been assassinated by Israel during the eight-month conflict, a policy approved by the Israeli government's security cabinet and by Mr Sharon, but widely condemned by international human rights activists as a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention."There will be no initiated army operations of any kind, unless the Palestinians shoot at us and endanger our lives or those of our civilians," Mr Sharon said. This was dismissed as nonsense by the Palestinians, who claimed the truce was immediately violated yesterday by raids into the Gaza Strip by Israeli tanks and bulldozers.Israel's announcement of a ceasefire won applause from the US and from George Mitchell. George Bush, who has avoided getting involved in the crisis, called both Yasser Arafat and Mr Sharon to urge them to make peace.
But it is primarily a tactical move by Mr Sharon to press home the advantage that he has secured in the wake of the publication of Monday's publication of the Mitchell report. By being seen to take the initiative on ending the violence, he is trying to pressure the Palestinians to stop their uprising without agreeing to one of their main demands and a pivotal Mitchell recommendation: a freeze on all Jewish settlement building in the occupied territories. In a TV appearance on Tuesday, Mr Sharon to the fury of the Palestinian leadership repeated his rejection of an all-out freeze, saying that there would be no new settlements but that expansion within existing settlements would continue, and Israel would continue to expropriate land for bypass roads. Some 200,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank and Gaza a figure that doubled during the eight-year Oslo process. Mr Sharon's stand has been made easier by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, who has indicated he sees the scope of the proposed settlement freeze as an issue to be negotiated after a ceasefire is achieved. This has dealt a blow to the chances that a lasting truce can now be re-established, using the already-battered Mitchell report as the starting point for a return to peace negotiations.
But although clearly worried, Javier Solana, the EU security envoy and one of the report's five authors, was yesterday clinging to hope.¿ A Palestinian hospital administrator has been held by Israeli intelligence services after returning from giving a presentation in Britain. The Department for International Development said it was looking into the case.. For decades they were locked away from public gaze and treated as pariahs, forced to live in isolation from their families and forbidden from having children. For decades they were locked away from public gaze and treated as pariahs, forced to live in isolation from their families and forbidden from having children. Yesterday the Japanese government finally acknowledged the suffering inflicted on tens of thousands of lepers incarcerated in remote colonies until as late as 1996. In an unexpected move, it announced that it would not appeal against a landmark court ruling ordering compensation to be paid to former and current patients with the disfiguring disease.For the people who took the legal action, that decision meant far more than money. "From tomorrow, we can walk the streets proudly as human beings," said Tatsuo Chiba. "Now they recognise that we are people too."Japan has lagged decades behind the rest of the world in its treatment of leprosy patients.
