Peace group calls for changes

UNITED NATIONS -- US and European negotiators called on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon yesterday to move forward with his plan for full withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, despite its rejection Sunday by Israeli conservatives.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, US Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and senior officials from Russia and the European Union said that Sharon's now uncertain offer to evacuate all settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank presented ''a rare moment of opportunity."

Sticking a foot in a door that seemed to be closing after Sharon was reported yesterday to be scaling down the evacuation plan, Powell said that Sharon's intention to cede land to the Palestinians could breathe new life into the Middle East peace plan.

The withdrawal would be ''a first step," and something ''that would change the equation and give us something to work with," Powell said.

Powell joined the rest of the negotiators in demanding that the most sensitive issues -- including the drawing of new borders and the ''right of return" of Palestinians to ancestral homes in Israel -- must be decided by both sides, not Israel alone.

The action came as Sharon took his first steps toward amending the Gaza pullout plan, holding consultations with Cabinet ministers on a new blueprint.

A senior Israeli official said Sharon would try to push through his proposal, which would empty all Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and four of 120 in the West Bank, with as few changes as possible. But Israeli newspapers reported Sharon now envisaged that only three of the 21 Gaza settlements and two in the West Bank would go.

Amid the negotiations, Israeli soldiers backed by tanks and helicopters attacked militant targets in three Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza Strip late yesterday, witnesses and security officials said, according to wire service reports. More than 20 armored vehicles rolled into a camp in Rafah, near the Egyptian border, and a similar number went into Deir el Balah in central Gaza. Bulldozers wrecked at least five houses in the Khan Younis camp as helicopters flew overhead, witnesses said.

In an interview with Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television, US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice tried to allay confusion about the Bush administration's support for both Sharon's plan and the so-called ''road map" peace plan, which would involve negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

''When you have the Israeli prime minister come to you and say, we'll withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza and from four West Bank settlements, we believe that that is worth doing," she said, noting that talks had stalled for three years. ''All of the negotiations that we've had over many, many years, we've never been able to see the Palestinians actually recover land."