Likud and Labor to form Coalition soon

Israel forms coalition
Labor joins the ruling Likud, aiding Sharon's Gaza withdrawal plan

From Associated Press Reports Dec 12, 2004


JERUSALEM - Israel's dovish Labor Party voted yesterday to join Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's ruling coalition, a move that makes it easier for the Israeli leader to implement his Gaza withdrawal plan next year.

Yoram Dori, an adviser to Labor leader Shimon Peres, said coalition talks were to begin late yesterday.

Sharon needs an alliance with Labor to push through his plan to pull out of the Gaza Strip next year and to prevent an early election. Sharon's hard-line Likud Party voted Thursday to open coalition talks with Labor. He invited Labor into the government early Friday.

"The Labor Central Committee authorized Shimon Peres to hold talks for a broad coalition. Negotiations with Likud will begin tonight," Dori told The Associated Press.


Sharon's plan to pull out of all Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements next year cost him his parliamentary majority.

Hard-liners in his Likud Party oppose the plan, and he needs Labor to push through legislation on the withdrawal plan and to prevent an early election. An early election could delay - or derail - the pullout, scheduled to begin in July 2005.

Sharon also has invited two religious parties to join the coalition. Government officials have said the goal is to hold speedy negotiations and form a broad coalition in the next two weeks.

Israeli media reported Sharon, 76, will offer Peres, 81, the post of deputy prime minister.

Sharon and Peres have served together in past governments. Peres served as Sharon's foreign minister from 2001-2002. Since then, the two men have expressed a desire to work together again, but have largely been prevented from doing so by their own supporters.

In another development yesterday, Yasser Arafat's nephew said his uncle may have died an "unnatural" death, a statement certain to renew speculation among Palestinians and in the rest of the Arab world where many already believe the late leader was poisoned despite Israel's vehement denials.

Nasser al-Kidwa, who is also Palestinian envoy to the United Nations, made the comments after he handed over the 558-page medical dossier to Palestinian officials in the West Bank town of Ramallah. No diagnosis or reason has been given for Arafat's death on Nov. 11 at a French hospital.

Al-Kidwa said French doctors could not rule out poisoning, but had not found traces in Arafat's body of "any poison known to them."

"Examinations of X-rays and all imaginable tests . . . are still with the same results, the inability of reaching a clear diagnosis," Al-Kidwa said at a news conference.

Arafat, suffering from a mysterious illness, was urgently airlifted to the Percy Military Training Hospital in the southwestern Paris suburb of Clamart, on Oct. 29. His condition rapidly deteriorated, and he fell into a coma.

A month after Arafat's death at the age of 75, speculation still swirls about what killed him, with rumors ranging from cirrhosis of the liver to AIDS to poisoning.

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