Progress on Hebron ‘Painfully Slow’

JERUSALEM —  Israel and the Palestinians inched closer Monday to an accord on the Israeli redeployment from the West Bank city of Hebron as negotiators struggled to find language acceptable to both sides in a draft of the emerging agreement and an accompanying letter of guarantee from the United States.

Officials involved in the intensive sessions said the negotiating teams have made what one called “painfully slow” progress toward completing the draft agreements. But they said a long-overdue deal on the pullout still was not complete.

Some participants, including Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordecai, said the agreement could be signed as early as today, but others pointed to the start-and-stall history of the Hebron talks and said they were hesitant to make predictions.

“There may be an agreement in conceptual terms, but until it’s written down, signed and sealed, there really is no agreement,” a U.S. official said.

U.S. special envoy Dennis Ross, who delayed a planned departure from the region Sunday amid reports of progress in the talks, is considering returning to Washington today if the agreement was not reached by then, U.S. officials said.

Late Monday, Ross held discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while the negotiating teams resumed their wrangling at a Jerusalem hotel over the wording of a U.S. letter of guarantee for both sides. The document, separate from the Hebron agreement itself, will contain a list of steps each side must take as the peace process goes forward.

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One U.S. official, clearly weary of the laborious negotiations, described the atmosphere between Israeli and Palestinian participants as “contentious, as usual.”

No issue seemed “too small for the two sides to argue over,” he said, but he added that even so, the negotiators were managing to resolve the problems, one by one.

Underscoring the tensions surrounding the process, the discussions were interrupted briefly Monday night by a bomb threat, telephoned to the Laromme Hotel by a German-speaking caller, Israel Radio reported.

Since early October, Israel and the Palestinians have been negotiating on when and how to implement an existing agreement for Israel’s troop pullback from about 80% of Hebron--a withdrawal originally scheduled for last March. The remainder of the city, where about 450 Jewish settlers and seminary students live among 100,000 Palestinians, will remain under the control of the Israeli army.

According to all involved, however, the deal on Hebron itself has been all but complete for several weeks while negotiators argue over broader issues at the heart of the peace process.

The most recent major stumbling block, for instance, has been over a timetable for three additional Israeli withdrawals from mostly rural areas of the West Bank. Israel had wanted to push the final pullback to May 1999. The Palestinians had demanded that Israel abide by the existing plan and complete the withdrawals by September.

But the impasse was broken after the intervention of Jordan’s King Hussein, who flew to the Gaza Strip and then Tel Aviv on Sunday and managed to persuade the parties to approve a compromise date in mid-1998.

The timetable will be contained in the document, known officially as a “Note for the Record,” that will amount to a U.S. letter of guarantee to both sides and a road map for the future of the peace process between them.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat has demanded the document to guarantee that Netanyahu will proceed beyond the Hebron withdrawal and implement other existing Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements.