FATAH leader Marwan Barghouthi, jailed in Israel during the Second Intifada, has warned Washington that vetoing a Palestinian state at the United Nations would spark huge regional protests.
Barghouthi convicted of organising attacks against Israelis during the second intifada, gave an interview to MENA through his lawyer from an Israeli prison.
‘Voting against the Palestinian state would be a historic, deadly mistake in the record of US President Barack Obama, in whom there was hope for change,’ he said of Palestinian plans to ask the United Nations for state recognition.
Washington, which has failed in its efforts to mediate peace between the Palestinians and Israel, will veto the proposal if it reaches the UN Security Council.
‘Such a veto will be confronted by millions-strong protests throughout the Arab and Muslim world, indeed throughout the whole world,’ Barghouthi was quoted as saying.
Obama’s push for an elusive peace deal has foundered on Israel’s refusal to stop expanding Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, occupied since 1967.
Barghouthi, in jail since 2002, is still widely respected in the Palestinian territories but is now seen more as a symbol of resistance to the occupation rather than a hands-on organiser.
He was convicted of five counts of murder, including a shooting at a Tel Aviv restaurant that killed three.
His comments may further worry Israel’s government, which said on Sunday that the Palestinians were planning ‘bloodshed’ to coincide with the UN General Assembly meeting in September, although it provided no proof of the charge.
The Palestinians have so far sat out on regional anti-regime demonstrations, but they have staged lengthy uprisings twice in the past three decades which Israeli intelligence services failed to predict.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian telecommunications company Paltel, said on Wednesday, that technicians were working to renew services to the Gaza Strip following an unprecedented outage overnight.
Paltel executive manager Ammar Al-Aker said that Israeli bulldozers destroyed a fibre-optics cable near the border that cut mobile, Internet and international landline services for over 12 hours beginning late Tuesday.
Al-Aker said bulldozers struck several cables, the first of which was located eight metres underground. Backup cables 20 metres deep also sustained damage, eventually taking the entire network offline.
Jawwal Towers receive signals from the cables, he said, so mobile services shut down.
Al-Aker said the Paltel group already obtained the necessary security coordination from Israel and have begun working to fix what the Israeli bulldozers damaged late Monday near Nahal Oz terminal.
An Israeli military spokeswoman denied involvement in the incident that damaged the wire, but said the army was investigating the circumstances and was coordinating to help repair the damage.
An assessment showed extensive damage and the work will take time, Al-Aker said. Jawwal places cables deeper underground than the global standard, so the operation must have been extensive, he said.
The official declined to discuss financial losses resulting from the incident.
During the blackout, calls to Gaza were met with error messages or dial tones as outages affected multiple platforms like outgoing landline services as well as mobile access including Israeli services.
People with subscriptions to international services like Blackberry were able to communicate, but some said reception was spotty and unreliable. Israeli wireless Internet remained online in some places.
• The US is concerned about Israel’s approval of over 900 housing units in the illegal settlement of Har Homa, built on Palestinian land in Bethlehem, an official said on Tuesday.
The US is ‘deeply concerned by continuing Israeli actions with respect to housing construction in Jerusalem. We have raised this issue with the Israeli government,’ White House advisor Tommy Vietor said.
Israel considers Har Homa part of Jerusalem, which it considers its capital.
Vietor said ‘unilateral actions work against efforts to resume direct negotiations and contradict the logic of a reasonable and necessary agreement between the parties.
‘We believe that through good faith direct negotiations, the parties should agree on an outcome that realises the aspirations of both parties for Jerusalem, and safeguards its unique religious status,’ he said.
In February, the US vetoed a resolution at the UN Security Council condemning illegal Israeli settlement building.
It was Washington’s first veto at the UN since President Barack Obama took office.
The US veto killed the resolution even though the 14 other members of the 15-nation council voted in favour.
