Grim WAsia events leave road map out of date

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 25: The three-year-old road map to Middle East peace has been overtaken by events and needs updating to reflect the grimmer situation on the ground, a top UN diplomat told the Security Council.

The refusal of the Palestinians' new Hamas government to reject violence and Israel's continued pursuit of settlement expansion and its barrier cutting deeply into Palestinian territory are among the developments making the road map unlikely to achieve its goals, said Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy for the WAsia peace process yesterday.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has invited the quartet of international mediators, the plan's creators, to New York on May 9 to discuss next steps, de Soto said.

''We must deal with the new situation with the right mixture of firm adherence to basic principles and creativity to meet a rapidly evolving reality,'' he said.

The road map, drafted by quartet members the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations in 2003, set out a blueprint for simultaneous actions by the Palestinians and the Israelis intended to lead to Palestinian statehood and peace between Israel and the Palestinians by this year.

Although it stalled right from the start, it has been guiding international action in the Middle East ever since.

But de Soto said the international community had to now ''address the new reality that both parties are on quite different trajectories from those they were on when the road map was drawn up.'' ''Much has happened on the ground in the meantime,'' he said during the council's regular monthly briefing on the W Asia. ''It is no exaggeration to say that prospects for achieving a two-state solution along the lines envisaged in the road map have receded through a combination of factors.'' ''There has been an alarming increase in violence since 30 March,'' when Hamas militants took over the Palestinian government after winning a January election, de Soto said.

Yet security could deteriorate even more as the Palestinian government is running out of money, unable to pay its security forces now that key donors have cut off direct aid over Hamas' refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist.

At least 29 Palestinians and 10 Israelis have been killed so far this month, he said. At least six of the Palestinians killed, as well as one of the Israelis, were children.

During the first two weeks of April, the Israeli military fired 2,415 artillery shells and 62 F-16 missiles inside the Gaza Strip, while Palestinian militants fired at least 113 rockets toward Israel, according to a UN count, he said.

Reuters