From DEBKAfile, March 30, 2008, 11:14 PM (GMT+02:00):
This demand, according to DEBKAfile’s military sources, would amount to lifting Israeli restrictions on Palestinian travel from the northern West Bank terrorist stronghold of Jenin all the way through Jerusalem’s outskirts to the southern West Bank Tarkumiyeh terminal, the Palestinian entry point from the Gaza Strip.
... US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice put this stipulation to prime minister Ehud Olmert, defense minister Ehud Barak and foreign minister Tzipi Livni, Sunday, March 30. It was one of three she wanted implemented in the five weeks before President George W. Bush’s attendance of Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations.
...Israel’s top military commanders warned government leaders in the strongest possible terms that the US secretary’s demands if met would ...expose Jerusalem and other Israeli cities to the waves of suicide killers .... The checkpoints were a vital element of their operations to keep Israel’s heartland safe from terrorists.
The Jenin-Tarkumiyeh route, they said, was already targeted by terrorists led by Hamas for two-way smuggling between Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Removing all existing controls would present the Gaza and Jenin terror networks with the gift of a direct, unmonitored link.
The military warning covered Condoleezza Rice’s second stipulation for free Palestinian travel between the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israeli commanders dismissed this as an invitation to import Gaza’s smuggling machinery of terrorists, explosives and disassembled rockets to the West Bank.
Rice’s third demand was for Israel to let 12,000 Palestinian security officers to train in Jordan for duty in all the West Bank’s towns. This is twenty times the number Israel proposed to allow.....
...Barak offered instead the removal of 50 dirt roadblocks and the checkpoint outside Jericho, as well as repeating the offer to allow 600 security officers trained in Jordan to deploy in Jenin....
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