P.L.O. says attacks will continue

Press, 19 December 1988, Page 10

P.L.O. says attacks will continue

NZPA-Reuter Tunis The Palestine Liberation Organisation has said it will not abandon attacks on military targets in Israel despite a renunciation of terrorism by the P.L.O. chairman, Yasser Arafat, last week. Mr Arafat’s remarks in Geneva opened the way for direct talks between the P.L.O. and the United States, but differing definitions of what constituted terrorism soon emerged at a first meeting between United States and P.L.O. officials in Tunis. A P.L.O. official said the United States Ambassador to Tunisia, Robert

Pelletreau, had told the Palestinian delegation that Washington hoped the P.L.O. would exclude terrorist elements and that it would condemn terrorist attacks. The P.L.O. team countered by saying it hoped the United States would clarify its position on what it called Israeli State terrorism and raised specifically the killing of a P.L.O. military commander in Tunisia last June. Israel has not officially claimed responsibility for the killing of P.L.O. military commander Abu Jihad.

The P.L.O. team said its organisation’s definition of

terrorism did not include attacks on military targets inside Israel or the oneyear civilian uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In Abu Dhabi, a senior P.L.O. official said that if President Reagan believed the P.L.O. would stop attacking Israeli military targets he should stop the dialogue between the two sides now.

“Neither military attacks nor our heroic intifada will stop ... We will carry on our. struggle until the Palestinian flag is hoisted over Jerusalem,” Salah Khalaf, No. 2 to Mr Arafat in the mainstream Fatah group, told a rally.