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Israel publicly coordinates weapons to abbas { December 29 2006 }

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   http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/12/29/MNGQEN9JMO1.DTL&type=politics

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/12/29/MNGQEN9JMO1.DTL&type=politics

Egypt reportedly sends arms to Abbas, with Israel's OK
- Steven Erlanger, New York Times
Friday, December 29, 2006

(12-29) 04:00 PST Jerusalem -- After coordination with Israel and the United States, Egypt has sent a shipment of weapons and ammunition into the Gaza Strip to forces loyal to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, Israeli officials said Thursday.

Senior Palestinian officials, including Abbas' spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, denied the report. Abu Rudeineh called it "Israeli propaganda aimed at aggravating the situation between Fatah and Hamas."

But Israeli officials knowledgeable about the shipment confirmed a report in the daily Haaretz that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert approved the shipment in his meeting Saturday evening with Abbas.

They said four trucks with 2,000 automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition clips and 2 million bullets had passed from Egypt through the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing, where Gaza, Israel and Egypt meet. The shipment was turned over to Abbas' Presidential Guard at the Karni crossing between Gaza and Israel, the officials said.

Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, a Cabinet member and former defense minister, told Israeli Army Radio that the weapons were intended to give Abbas "the capability to hold his own against those organizations that are trying to spoil everything."

That was an apparent reference to the militant Hamas faction, which gained control of the Palestinian government by winning parliamentary elections in January. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist and rejects previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements that call for a permanent two-state solution.

U.S. officials were circumspect but said various moves to support Abbas' forces were taking place, including securing money for training the Presidential Guard and Israeli approval for the return to the Palestinian territories of a group of a thousand or so well-trained but aging Fatah fighters, the Badr Brigade of the Palestine Liberation Organization. They have been barred from returning and are living in Jordan.

The Bush administration is seeking congressional support for up to $100 million, mostly for salaries and training, to strengthen Abbas and his security forces and extend their control over the Gaza crossing points.

A senior American official who deals with the Palestinians insisted that the point was not to promote civil war with Hamas, but to help Abbas and Fatah and "to provide deterrence and balance" in Gaza, where Hamas is especially strong.

The arms shipment is part of a broader U.S. and Israeli effort, in coordination with moderate Arab countries like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, to strengthen Abbas, weaken Hamas and show some movement on the stalled issue of Israeli-Palestinian peace.

At the meeting on Saturday, Olmert also promised to eliminate some West Bank checkpoints and turn over to Abbas $100 million of the roughly $500 million that the Israelis have collected for the Palestinians but have refused to turn over since Hamas took power.

But officials involved consider their efforts something short of a plan. That, they say, is because Fatah remains weak, Abbas is unpredictable and too wedded to the Fatah old guard, and conditions are not ripe for a major effort to reach a comprehensive settlement.

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