A right wing party walked out of the ruling Israeli coalition today in protest at a new effort to start peace talks with the Palestinians.
The departure of the hawkish and controversial Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu party was widely predicted but leaves the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, with a weakened majority.
Lieberman, an immigrant from Russia who lives in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, warned he would resign from the cabinet if Olmert began to negotiate on core issues with Palestinian leaders.
"Negotiations on the basis of land for peace are a critical mistake … and will destroy us," Lieberman said today.
"If we pull back to the 1967 borders, everyone should ask himself, what will happen the following day? Will the conflict stop, will the terror stop? Nothing will change."
Olmert brought Lieberman into the government in late 2006 to shore up his coalition after Yisrael Beiteinu emerged as the best performing right wing party in elections earlier that year. The departure reduces the size of Olmert’s coalition by 11 seats, leaving him with 67 seats in the 120-member parliament.
Lieberman courted controversy as he left office today when he repeated his call for a land swap that would see Israel exclude and strip citizenship from a large part of its Arab population. "Our problem is not with the Palestinians but with Israeli Arabs," he said.
He then compared two Arab MPs in Israel’s parliament to leaders of the Hamas Islamist movement, which brought swift criticism from Ahmed Tibi, a leading Arab MP. "We are the salt of the earth. He is the immigrant and we will be here long after him," Tibi said.
Lieberman’s departure underlines the weak position Olmert holds at a time when he has committed himself to negotiating a peace agreement with the Palestinians. He faces another political challenge at the end of this month when an official inquiry into the failings of the war in Lebanon will present its second report, which is expected to be strongly critical.
Despite the ongoing peace talks, the conflict continued today. Israeli forces killed three Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including a boy aged 12, and shot dead a militant from Islamic Jihad in the occupied West Bank. Palestinian militants fired more than 20 makeshift rockets and mortars into southern Israel.
Yesterday an Israeli incursion into Gaza left at least 18 Palestinians dead, many of them Hamas gunmen, in what was the worst day of fighting for more than a year.
Today an Israeli air strike destroyed a pickup truck in eastern Gaza City. Three people were killed: Amir Yazagi, 12, and his father and uncle. A militant group, the Popular Resistance Committees, said its chief rocket maker had been driving nearby in a similar car and suggested he had been the intended target of the attack.
Maj. Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokeswoman, said that the Yazagi car had been "unintentionally hit."
"It is important to me to stress that we have no intention whatsoever to hit or hurt uninvolved civilians," she said.
Following yesterday’s heavy fighting, Khaled Meshal, the exiled Hamas leader based in Damascus, ruled out any prisoner swap for the release of an Israeli soldier captured in mid-2006. Reports had suggested a deal to release Corporal Gilad Shalit, who was captured close to the Gaza boundary, was near.
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