Israel will push forward with plans to withdraw from some Palestinian areas and draw its own borders if a summit between Israeli and Palestinian leaders next week fails to revive a languished peace plan, an aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said.
The Israeli and Palestinian leaders have tentatively agreed to meet Tuesday if a final planning session went well yesterday.
Israeli soldiers, meanwhile, shot dead two Palestinian militants before dawn on Saturday as they crawled through an off-limits military zone toward a fence separating the Gaza Strip from Israel, the military said.
The men were armed with two Kalashnikov assault rifles, 10 hand grenades and a pipe bomb and apparently planned to cross the fence to attack an Israeli farming village, the military said.
A long-delayed first summit between Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia will focus on jump-starting the "road map" peace plan, stalled since it was launched last June. The US-backed plan aims to end more than three years of fighting and create a Palestinian state next year.
But neither side has met first-phase requirements under the plan, which was drawn up jointly by the US, the UN, the EU and Russia.
The Palestinians have refused to crack down on militant groups that have killed more than 450 people in suicide bombings alone, in addition to staging numerous shooting attacks. And Israel has not gone ahead with troop pullbacks or frozen construction in Jewish settlements built on land in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that Palestinians want for their future country.
Amid the deadlock, Sharon has threatened to pursue unilateral moves to "disengage" from the Palestinians. Israel would pull troops and settlers out of nearly all of Gaza and perhaps also parts of the West Bank. Israel would then draw its own temporary border with the West Bank, but one that would leave the Palestinians with much less land than they seek.
Palestinians fear Sharon's plan is to pull forces out of Gaza, but further entrench Israel in large parts of the West Bank, making it impossible to create a viable independent state there.
There are also suspicions that Sharon's talk of unilateral moves means Israel is quietly abandoning the concept of a negotiated solution to generations of Middle East conflict.
For now, Israel is pursuing both the peace program and its plan for a unilateral separation if the road map leads nowhere.
"We are proceeding with the road map as if there is no disengagement plan and proceeding with the disengagement plan as if there is no road map," Sharon adviser Assaf Shariv said.
But a failure to nail down progress on the peace plan in next week's summit could bring Israel a step closer to implementing the disengagement plan, Shariv said.
"If we don't advance in the road map, then we have our own plan," he said. However, Shariv stopped short of saying Israel would abandon the road map altogether.
Palestinian officials also said the road map plan would be at the center of the summit.
A high-ranking Palestinian official said the two leaders would also form committees to work out a timetable and logistics for an Israeli troop pullback to lines held before fighting broke out in September 2000. The road map calls for such a pullback.
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