Palestinians open Gaza-Egypt border
Middle East Desk Report

RAFAH (Gaza Strip)—Palestinians formally opened a border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt on Friday that will allow Gazans to travel abroad freely for the first time since Israel occupied the coastal territory in 1967.
“I think every Palestinian now has his passport ready in his pocket. Let them come to cross at this terminal whenever they want,” said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas cut the ribbon to open the terminal where cross-border movement will be supervised by European Union monitors as part of a U.S.-brokered deal after Israel’s Gaza pullout in September.
The first travelers will be able to begin using the terminal on Saturday. Israel, citing security concerns, will keep on eye on traffic through a video link set up as part of the agreement. The Rafah deployment marks the EU’s first monitoring role in the Palestinian territories.
“We want to ... transform your borders into bridges with your neighbors and with Israel. Israel is also your neighbor,” EU Middle East envoy Mark Otte said at the ceremony. Mahmoud al-Zahar, a leader of the militant Hamas group, attended the event, although he said Hamas had reservations about the Rafah agreement. Hamas is running for the first time in a Palestinian parliamentary election, slated for January.
The border crossing deal was seen as a sign of improved Israel-EU relations. But an Israeli official indicated that ties might cool if the European Union went ahead and endorsed a draft report critical of Israeli policy in Arab East Jerusalem.
“It would surely be a pity if this positive momentum would stop and we would see a regression to the one-sided (European) position of the past,” said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev. The draft report by EU diplomats in East Jerusalem and the West Bank town of Ramallah to the 25-member group’s foreign ministers was leaked to the media and recommended a more aggressive policy toward Israeli actions in the holy city.
“Israeli policies are reducing the possibility of reaching a final-status agreement on Jerusalem that any Palestinian could accept,” said the report, citing house demolitions and Israel’s internationally-condemned West Bank barrier. Israel captured East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war. It has declared all of Jerusalem its united capital, a position that has not won international recognition.
Palestinians want to make East Jerusalem the capital of a state they aspire to establish in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In Gaza, EU monitors toured the terminal to prepare for the first travelers on Saturday. For the first two weeks it will operate for only four hours a day until all 70 EU inspectors arrive, probably by mid-December.
During the years of Israeli occupation, passengers would have to queue for hours as Israeli security personnel searched their belongings and questioned them. On the Israeli political front, a fresh batch of opinion polls predicted Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s new centrist party would win the March 28 election, altering Israel’s political map by crushing rightists opposed to land-for-peace deals with the Palestinians.
The polls, the most comprehensive conducted since Sharon quit the right-wing Likud party he helped found, indicated that he could set up a ruling coalition with the center-left Labor Party led by former trade union leader Amir Peretz.