P.L.O. chief defines border ambitions

Press, 18 February 1983, Page 8

P.L.O. chief defines border ambitions

NZPA-Reuter Algiers A top official of the Palestine Liberation Organisation has. apparently for the first time, defined with precision the borders of the independent Palestinian State it seeks. "This State will be in Gaza and on the West Bank with Jerusalem as its capital." the chairman of the P.L.O's pariiament-in-exile, Khaled Fahoum. told a press conference in Algiers yesterday. Mr Fahoum. who had just been re-elected chairman of the Palestine National Council. was answering a question on how he interpreted a Middle East peace plan adopted at an Arab summit meeting in the Moroccan city of Fez in September.

The plan indirectly recognised Israel’s right to exist within its pre-1967 borders in exchange for the creation of an independent Palestinian State, but it did not clearly fix the State's borders. The official P.L.O. stand.

taking into account the claims of hardliners to the whole of Israel, had been to say that the Palestinian State would be created on any liberated part of Palestine. , Council sources said that Mr Fahoum’s statement had cleared up this ambiguity, but it remained to be seen whether it reflected a majority in the P.L.O. or simply his own opinion. The aim of the P.N.C.’s today session in Algiers is to produce a formal response to Middle East peace proposals. It is the council's first meeting since the P.L.O. chairman. Mr Yasser Arafat, adopted a moderate diplomatic approach, after last (northern) summer’s battles in Beirut- which resulted in

the removal of P.L.O. guerrillas from Lebanon. Mr. Fahoum predicted that the P.N.C. would back the Fez plan and Mr Arafat said on Algerian television: "The Palestinian decision is that adopted by our Arab 7 brothers in Fez.” The council was expected to dismiss President Ronald Reagan’s Middle East proposals calling for Palestinian self-rule on the Israeli-occu-pied West Bank and Gaza Strip in association with Jordan as insufficient. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine under George Habash, and certain pro-Syrian groups, such as the PLFP-General Command headed by Ahmed Jibril, had argued for the explicit rejection of the Reagan plan.