| Report: Deal underway to hand over Gaza, Bethlehem to Palestinians
According to a report published over the weekend in the Los Angeles Times, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell toiled over final details of an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority to hand over control of the Gaza strip and the West Bank city of Bethlehem to the new PA government, sources on all three sides said.
Under the deal, Israel would withdraw from an area more than four times the size of the area initially discussed in the U.S.-backed roadmap. The first stage called for an Israeli withdrawal focusing only on a small northern area of the Gaza Strip, and did not mention the West Bank city at all.
Palestinian officials said that even though there are still some roadblocks in the deal, the pull-out could be the first building block of a wider peace package that would include a halt to Israel’s targeted killings of Palestinian militants and a cease-fire by Hamas. The Palestinian officials added that a U.S. team of State Department and CIA officers, led by envoy John Wolf, would monitor both the withdrawal and the cease-fire.
Israeli officials were cautiously optimistic. "This could work," said a senior Israeli diplomat, and added that Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas would be given a “grace-period” of over a week, in which Israel would not take military actions in
response to violence in Gaza. "The idea is to give them a chance," he said.
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