--------------------------------

‘Palestinians’ refuse to renounce terror option

The Palestinian Arab terrorist organizations announced Thursday they would not relinquish the option of murdering Jewish men, women and children to attain their political goals, and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas still won’t disarm them.

Abbas tried for two days in Cairo to convince the heads of 13 terror groups to declare a formal temporary cessation of their campaign to kill Israelis.

The summit ended with the terrorists pledging to maintain the current calm for the time being, but refusing to commit to nonviolence.

Under the terms of the Oslo Accords and the Road Map peace plan, Abbas is obligated to disarm and dismantle the terror groups, a commitment he insists he will not honor.

But until he does, Israel maintains the peace process cannot progress.

Failed summit

Abbas and 13 top “Palestinian” terror bosses flew to Cairo Tuesday for a two day summit to discuss the PLO chief’s proposal for a one-year formal cessation of Arab terrorism against Israeli Jews.

Abbas needs the ceasefire in order to negate pressure for him to forcibly combat “Palestinian” terror, and to enable the PA to extract further concessions from Israel at the negotiating table.

As the summit got underway Tuesday evening, Abbas spoke of the benefits a long-term truce would bring the “Palestinian” cause.

There was no mention of the moral repugnancy of maiming and killing Israeli men, women and children.

But as talks wrapped up Thursday, Hamas and its sister Islamic terror groups said they could not relinquish their “right” to murder Jews in order to achieve their nationalistic aims.

Calm with a price

Instead, the terrorists pledged to maintain the current relative calm, but only if Israel caved to their demands.

“What was agreed upon today is calm until the end of this year as a maximum period of time in exchange for an Israeli commitment to withdrawal from [PA-controlled] cities and release" all jailed terrorist prisoners, top Gaza-based Hamas official Mohammad Nazzal told reporters.

Abbas’s noncompliance

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon responded by calling the promise of more calm a “positive step,” but insisted progress towards a final peace settlement could not be made until the terrorists were disarmed.

“The terrorist organizations cannot continue to exist as armed groups and certainly not as terrorist organizations,” read a statement from Sharon’s office, opening a possible door for the groups to be recognized as political factions.

“The real test will be the action the Palestinian Authority takes on the ground. As long as these organizations remain armed, I doubt very much that there will be much quiet on the ground," a senior Israeli official told Ha’aretz.

The PLO committed more than a decade ago to renounce terrorism and ensure no armed anti-Israel groups existed in areas under its control.

That obligation has been repeated in each agreement signed over the past ten years, as Yasser Arafat and Abbas systematically refused to implement it.

One additional point should be highlighted - with info coming from The Ragsheet no less:

[T]he Gaza-based Popular Resistance Committees said on Friday it would not abide by the terms of the agreement.

I can see the value of the "calm" for the terrorists - giving them time to regroup; but what is in it for Israel???

Also for the record, here is the State Deprtment reaction, taken from the official State Deprtment site:

QUESTION: A number of Palestinian militant groups say that they have agreed to an open-ended halt to attacks on Israel provided that certain conditions are met. There are a bunch of conditions. They include -- I'm sure you've seen the reports -- things like prisoner releases and so on. Is it a good thing, even this conditional temporary cessation of such attacks or a commitment to do so?

MR. ERELI [Deputy Spokesman]: What we're really looking for and what we think is important is an end to all violence. And at the end of the day, that's what's going to make a difference, is a renunciation of violence, a dismantling of terrorist capabilities and a full and complete embrace of the notion of peaceful engagement and peaceful dialogue.

The steps we're seeing today, the steps that have been underway for some time are, I guess, incremental progress toward that ultimate goal. But I would stress the word "incremental" and I would call them very provisional and therefore not -- while certainly not negative, they don't go as far as we'd like. And they don't -- you know, what's important is to get at the root causes of all this, which is the acceptance of violence as a means to solve a problem, terrorist violence as a means to solve a problem and the ability to wage -- to conduct terrorist activities.