AUG 23, 2001
After Rumblings of Mideast Talks, Lots of Skepticism
By CLYDE HABERMAN
NABLUS, West Bank, Aug. 22 — The funeral procession moved briskly on foot past Amjad Shakah's furniture store today. It had all the usual trappings, which is to say it had impassioned cries of Palestinian nationalism, angry threats against Israel and an ear-shattering barrage of shooting into the air.
No funeral for a Palestinian killed by Israeli soldiers — and four bodies were taken to the cemetery today — seems to be complete without these bursts of automatic rifle fire. Dozens of young men walked and shot, walked and shot, walked and shot. Some of them were of such tender ages that they looked to be a year and a half from their first shave.
Amjad Shakah hated it.
All the shooting scared his little boys. Besides, he said, if Palestinians and Israelis are locked into something that can be called a miniwar, isn't this firing into the air perhaps a waste of bullets?
"Nobody likes it," he said, standing outside his store, which was shuttered in respect for the funeral march going by. "But what can we do? Our government accepts this. They think it's a way to relieve the pressure."
But his distaste for the shooting was no match for his pain at seeing yet more wooden biers being borne through the streets of Nablus, in the northern tier of the West Bank.
Nor did he fail to notice that the four men about to be buried were the first people, Israeli or Palestinian, to be killed mere hours after political leaders disclosed plans for new talks to try to breathe life into a moribund cease-fire.
"What's the point?" Mr. Shakah said. "It is useless. It's just to show the world that they're ready to talk, but I don't think that any cease-fire will be implemented on the ground."
Skepticism ruled on both sides today, a day after it was announced that Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister, would meet soon to see if they could bring about the first meaningful truce in the 11-month-old conflict.
No date or place was set, though next week seems likely and Berlin looks like a possible site, given that this latest push toward a laying down of arms came from Germany's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer.
There is still "a good chance and a full chance" for peace, Mr. Peres said today on a visit to Warsaw.
Far from every Israeli shared his optimism. One who did not was his immediate predecessor as foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami. "So what exactly is the purpose of this mythological meeting?" Mr. Ben-Ami wrote today in the newspaper Yediot Ahronot. "There is no aspirin solution to the spreading cancer of this bitter conflict."
If many Israelis were doubtful, most Palestinians were absolutely certain that nothing much would result from an Arafat-Peres meeting, a feeling that hardened like a cement block after a sharp rise in the body count today.
The funeral in Nablus was for four men killed by Israeli soldiers overnight in disputed circumstances.
Then, this afternoon, near the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, Israeli Army helicopters fired missiles at a car carrying a man described as a master bomb maker for the Islamic group Hamas. The missiles missed him, witnesses said, and hit a different car, killing another Hamas militant, Bilal al-Ghoul.
The army confirmed the attack tonight, saying its helicopters had struck what it called terrorist cells firing mortar rounds at Israeli targets. But Palestinians called the incident an assassination, part of Israel's continuing campaign of killing specific militants accused of being behind anti-Israel terrorism.
That Palestinians took no Israeli lives today was not for want of trying. In a drive-by shooting near Jenin in the northern West Bank, Palestinians fired at an Israeli garbage truck, wounding two men riding inside. One man was hit in both legs. The other received what were described as minor injuries.
All this came a day after the police in downtown Jerusalem defused a huge bomb planted in the trunk of a car parked near local police headquarters, on a street packed with restaurants and bars. It was far from the first time in recent weeks that Israelis had managed to escape an explosion that could have left many of them dead.
The overnight killings on the outskirts of Nablus could not have produced more conflicting reconstructions from Israelis and Palestinians.
There was no argument that several Palestinian men had tried to plant a roadside bomb not far from Shavei Shomron, an Israeli settlement near Nablus. There was also no argument that Israeli soldiers came upon those men and fired.
But the local Israeli commander, Col. Yossi Adiri, said two Palestinians were killed, while Palestinians insisted that only one man had died, a 23-year-old named Ahed Fares.
Even more confusing were the accounts of what followed.
Apparently, people from a nearby village, Beit Iba, went out in the dead of night to the same area. According to Colonel Adiri, at least one of the new arrivals was armed. Soldiers opened fire, the colonel said, and three Palestinians were killed. In all, the death toll was five, the army said, without explaining why there seemed to be only four bodies from this incident.
The Palestinians said that the Beit Iba people had all been unarmed and ventured out only to retrieve Mr. Fares's body. To Palestinians in Nablus, the shootings amounted to nothing less than murder.
Whatever the reality of those events, there was no mistaking the sullenness that lay like a cloud cover over Nablus today. As calls for revenge filled the air, audible between volleys of rifle fire, no one seemed in a mood to talk about a truce.
"The Jews proved that they do not keep their word," said a store owner who gave his name only as Abu Khaled. "They tell the world they want peace, but they do not keep their word. We do not believe anything until it is on the ground. Otherwise, it's words in the wind."
Down the block, Mr. Shakah watched the last of the funeral procession disappear behind a curve. He is a mild-looking man, soft-spoken. But his words rang ominously, certainly for Israelis.
"Our losses are bigger than theirs," he said. "But we might reach a point where we have equal losses, and then more losses on the Israeli side. They should take that into consideration, and be wise."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
