Abbas Demands Rice to Press on Israel to get out from Rafah Border Crossing
www.ipc.gov.ps/ipc_new/english/details.asp?name=6688

GAZA, Palestine, August 11,2005 (IPC+Agencies)-[Official PA website]--Nabil
Abu Rudenh, the spokesperson of presidency said that the president Mahmoud
Abbas (Abu Mazen) made a telephone conversation with the USA Secretary of
State, Condoleezza Rice briefed her on the Palestinian preparations for
impeding Israeli pullout from the Strip.

"President Mahmoud Abbas gave his assurance that the Palestinians were ready
for the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip," the spokesman, Nabil Abu
Rudenh, said in Gaza City.

In his conversation with Rice, Abbas also urged the top US diplomat to put
pressure on Israel to withdraw its troops from the Egypt-Gaza border
crossing, where Cairo is slated to deploy 750 border guards under a
tentative agreement.

Meanwhile, the premier Arial Sharon asserted just days before the impeding
pullout from Gaza that he will retain control on the settlement blocks in
the West Bank an illegal home of further 245,000 settlers.

Sharon said in interview with the Israeli TV Channel "one "The settlement
blocs will continue to exist. I will not negotiate on the subject of
Jerusalem. The blocs will remain territorially linked to the state of
Israel."

"At the same time, there will be no return of 1948 Palestinian refugees to
Israel,", in reference to the indigenous Palestinians, who were displaced
from their cities , towns and villages upon the creation of Israel in 1948.

In the same context, the Israeli daily Jerusalem post quoted the Vice Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert saying Wednesday that Israel's Gaza pullout will be
"complete," and will include a withdrawal from a critical road along Gaza's
border with Egypt, known as the Philadelphia corridor, although he said an
agreement for the pullback there would likely be reached only after the
evacuation of the Gaza
settlements.

"We will not be in any territory that is part of the recognized boundaries
of Gaza," he said. "We will be completely out."

"The pullout from Gaza is in no way an attempt to trade off Gaza for the
West Bank," Olmert said in a Jerusalem address to members of the foreign
press sponsored by the Washington DC based pro-Israel advocacy group 'The
Israel Project.'

"This may be suspected by some, and misinterpreted by some, but this is not
the policy of the government of Israel," he said.

Olmert also said that the government was prepared to carry on negotiations
with the Palestinians after this month's disengagement according to the
internationally-backed peace plan "Road Map".

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