Palestinians agree to Israeli monitoring
Middle East Desk Report

JERUSALEM—The Palestinians agreed Thursday to allow Israeli inspectors to monitor goods entering the Gaza Strip to safeguard against arms smuggling, yielding a key point in the final phase of Israel’s Gaza pullout.
Egypt will begin deploying troops on the Gaza border by Sunday, Israeli defense officials said, marking another milestone in ending the 38-year occupation, even though more work remains to be done on how the border will be supervised. Concerned that Gaza could be a staging ground for terrorism and rocket attacks, Israel has insisted on monitoring people and goods entering the sensitive coastal strip to ensure against the smuggling of arms and explosives.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Nasser al-Kidwa said the Palestinian Authority was ready to consider continued Israeli inspection of cargo at a new border terminal to be built at the junction of Gaza, Israel and Egypt. But Israel cannot have control over people, who would continue entering and leaving Gaza through the Rafah crossing, he said.
The Rafah crossing “should work for individuals, for people in both directions, and must work for goods in at least one direction, out of Gaza. We would consider goods to enter in the way Israel has proposed, in the trilateral crossing,” al-Kidwa said in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
Egyptian and Israeli generals were to sign an accord in Cairo later Thursday to allow 750 lightly armed troops to deploy in the area, overriding a demilitarization clause in the countries’ 1979 peace treaty.
Israel’s parliament approved the deal Wednesday after the details were settled by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and Egypt’s intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. Egypt has given Israel assurances it will block arms smuggling, but the difficulty of monitoring the frontier was evident even when Israel had total control, and smuggling was rampant via tunnels dug through the Mediterranean sand.
Israel reaped the first diplomatic benefit from the Gaza pullout when the Israeli and Pakistani foreign ministers met Thursday in the neutral venue of Istanbul, Turkey, in the first acknowledged high-level meeting between the Jewish State and the overwhelmingly Muslim country. Israeli officials said the meeting between Israel’s Silvan Shalom and his Pakistan counterpart Khursheed Kasuri was arranged at the request of Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a key U.S. ally in the Indian subcontinent, in response to Israel’s Gaza pullout.