PROPOSED TRUCE IN PALESTINE

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25483, 1 May 1948, Page 7

PROPOSED TRUCE IN PALESTINE

REPORT TO SECURITY COUNCIL ARABS REFUSE TO MEET JEWS (Rec. 7 p.m.) NEW YORK, April 29. A high United Nations official said to-day that the truce commission for Palestine had advised the Security Council that it had been unable to arrange a meeting between the Arabs and Jews to consider ending the fighting. The Arabs refused to attend a session with the Jews, who had agreed to discussions. To-day’s discussion in the Trusteeship Council was aimed at broadening the Jewish-Arab truce for Jerusalem’s walled city to cover all Jerusalem. Mr Jamal Hussfeini, df the Arab Higher Committee, said: "‘We cannot rely on any assurance that foreign troops will not be used for political purposes outside the protection' of Jerusalem.” The Arab Higher Committee rejected the idea of a United Nations’-volun-ter police force for Jerusalem, but said that the/ Arabs would not fire on members of'the force if they were sent to the Holy City. ' The Jewish Agency endorsed the proposal, but said that it would require several thousand men to protect all Jerusalem and its holy places. v In a further debate in the Assembly’s Political Committee to-day, the United States delegate denied reports that the United States was planning a new shift in her Palestine policy. She still favoured indefinite trusteeship as the best solution to the Palestine problem. Iraq proposed that the trusteeship be limited to one or two years and that the vital question of Jewish immigration be held in abeyance until the trusteeship ended. Both the Trusteeship Council and the Political Committee adjourned till to-morrow. The Jewish correspondent of the British United Press reports that Jews and Arabs in the Old City of Jerusalem stopped their mass evacuation when they received news of the United Nations’ truce plan for Jerusalem.