Caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday that 250 Palestinian prisoners would be freed in a goodwill gesture, as Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas urged Israel to maintain the Gaza truce. The pair met in Occupied Jerusalem for the first time in two months, amid rising tension in and around the besieged Gaza Strip.
On November 5, Israel shattered a five month truce with the Hamas movement that runs the Gaza Strip by invading the territory and killing seven of the Islamist group's members. Since then, Palestinian fighters retaliated by firing rockets into Israel while the Jewish state tightened its crippling siege of the enclave.
"Abbas had asked him to free Palestinian prisoners and Olmert told him of the decision to release 250 at the beginning of December," Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said.
In a similar move in August, Israel freed 198 Palestinian prisoners. More than 11,000 Palestinians are still held in Israeli prisons.
A senior Israeli official said that none of the prisoners to be freed belongs to Palestinian movements such as Hamas, the Islamist movement which took power in the Gaza Strip in June 2007 after having won legislative elections deemed democratic and fair by international observers in 2006.
Since the Hamas takeover, the secular Abbas has held sway only in the Occupied West Bank.
But he said that during his talks at Olmert's official residence in Occupied Jerusalem, Abbas stressed "the need to maintain the truce in Gaza because it eases the suffering of the Palestinian people."
He also urged Palestinian resistance fighters not to retaliate to Israeli violations of the truce, which went into effect in and around Gaza on June 19, by launching rockets at Israel.
"In other words, stop the futile rocket firings that don't help the Palestinian cause in any way," Abbas said.
Abbas also met British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who said it was "vital" the cease-fire be maintained. "
The discussions you have had today [with Olmert] seem to me to be a very important contribution to that," Miliband told the Palestinian president.
Miliband earlier toured Sderot, an Israeli town that comes under rocket fire from neighboring Gaza.
Following the breaking of the truce by Israel, and the Palestinian response it prompted, the Jewish state furthered tighten its blockade and completely seal off the aid-dependent Gaza Strip, though it allowed a rare delivery of humanitarian supplies on Monday for the first time in almost two weeks.
Human rights organizations, EU officials and UN agencies have decried the Israeli siege - first imposed after Hamas won the 2006 polls and tightened after the Islamists ousted Fatah in 2007 - as collective punishment of a civilian population, an act illegal under international law.
Israel it allowed in 33 truckloads of humanitarian supplies into the coastal strip on Monday.
A UN spokesman said that many more deliveries would be needed in the impoverished and overcrowded territory.
"We cannot have another period when people are not getting their food assistance. We cannot allow people to get punished in that way," said Chris Gunness of the UN Works and Relief Agency, which distributes food to 750,000 Gazans - half the population.
The Israeli premier meanwhile claimed to Abbas that Hamas is to blame for violations of the truce in and around the Gaza Strip, and warned that if violence escalates, "Israel will have to respond," a senior Israeli official said.
On Monday, several rockets fired from the Gaza Strip hit southern Israel without causing any casualties.
The Israeli violation of the truce and successive violence, broken pledges by the Jewish state to halt illegal settlement activity as well as the political and geographical division of the Palestinian territories between Hamas-ruled Gaza and the Occupied West Bank under Abbas have complicated the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.
Palestinians and the international community say continued Jewish settlement activity in the Israeli-occupied West Bank is major stumbling block in the talks that were relaunched at a US conference in November 2007 after a seven-year hiatus.
"I called for a halt to all settlement activity," Abbas said after his talks with Olmert.
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