Hebron Palestinian chief in rare talks with Jewish settlers
HEBRON, West Bank (AFP) — A prominent Palestinian in the West Bank city of Hebron met Israeli officials and settler leaders to ask that they ease travel restrictions in the bitterly divided city, they said on Monday.
In a rare face-to-face encounter, Farid Khader al-Jaabari, the chief of one of the main clans in the city, met on Sunday with local Israeli army commander Yehuda Fuks and the mayor of the Kiryat Arba settlement, Tzvi Katsover.
Jaabari called for the meeting to protest against restrictions on movement in the city of 170,000 Palestinians, with a small enclave of hard-line settlers in its centre and the larger Kiryat Arba settlement surrounding it.
"We live encircled. Cars cannot get through and residents have to carry things on foot for more than a kilometre (half a mile)," Jaabari told AFP after the talks.
"I asked them to open our street and to lift the barricades, but until I see results I cannot say whether the get-together was worthwhile," he added.
The settlers agreed to meet Jaabari as a sign of appreciation after he intervened to prevent the destruction of a synagogue illegally built on land belonging to him near the entrance to Kiryat Arba, a settler official told AFP.
The synagogue was later removed by Israeli forces.
Hebron, which hosts a mosque-synagogue complex built on the site of the tomb of Abraham -- a holy site for both Muslims and Jews -- has been a flashpoint in the Middle East conflict since Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war.
Tensions between settlers and Palestinians came to a head in 1994, when a Jewish fanatic opened fire on Muslims praying at the Ibrahimi Mosque, which Jews call the Tomb of the Patriarchs, killing 29 of them.
In accordance with the 1994 Oslo autonomy accords, Israel withdrew from 80 percent of Hebron in 1997, but a few hundred hardline settlers guarded by thousands of Israeli troops remain in the heart of Hebron's old city.
