Talks with Shamir denied by group

Press, 26 July 1989, Page 11

Talks with Shamir denied by group

NZPA-Reuter Jerusalem Local Palestinian nationalists have denied reports that they met the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, over Israel’s plan for elections in the occupied territories. They said the Palestine Liberation Organisation was either misled or misinformed in speaking of such a meeting. Salah Khalaf, an aide to the P.L.O.’s chairman, Yasser Arafat, said yesterday four Palestinians had recently met Mr Shamir.

He named them as “Gaza businessman Mansur Shawwa, a Ramallah lawyer, Jamil Tarifi an East Jerusalem journalist, Mahmoud Abu Zuluf, and Ezzedin al-Arian, head of the Red Crescent medical aid society on the West Bank. Mr Shawwa. Mr Zuluf and Mr Arian all denied the meeting. Mr Tarifi refused to confirm or deny the report.

“I think they are being fed the wrong information. They should have rechecked,”, said Mr Zuluf, editor and publisher of the East Jerusalem newspaper “al-Quds.”

A Palestinian nationalist, Saed Kenaan, explaining the discrepancy, said the Popular Front for the

Liberation of Palestine (P.F.L.P.), more hardline than Mr Arafat’s Fatah faction, had threatened local leaders who met Mr Shamir. “Fatah has the upper hand, but you don’t know when the P.F.L.P. will throw petrol bombs or set your car on fire. They have ways of silencing us,” Mr Kenaan, a Nablus businessman, told Reuters. Mr Khalaf, also known as Abu Iyad, said in Tunis that the four men met Mr Shamir after receiving clearance from the P.L.O. and each had relayed an independent report of his meeting. ■

“Abu Iyad can say whatever he wants. I haven’t met him,” Mr Shawwa said. Mr Arian, a member of the Palestine National Council, the P.L.O.’s Parliament-in-exile, told Reuters, “Maybe Mr Iyad has received the wrong information from the occupied territories.” Mr Kenaan said the P.F.L.P. last week distributed leaflets in the occupied territories warning that anyone who met Mr Shamir would be labelled a traitor and “dealt with” by the popular committees organising the 19month Palestinian uprising, or “intifada.”