Jerusalem, June 16, 2008 –IR Summary/NTY - Israel is reported to be building thousands of housing units on the captured land and that is dangerous as per Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, who further said on Sunday why Israel was still blocking three Fulbright grantees from leaving Gaza?

She said that the construction was reducing confidence in the talks and so the United States hope to get the two sides to produce a peace framework by year’s end, but the Palestinians say the new housing is a big stumbling block.

Rice stressed that any such building would not be considered permanent by the United States, saying, “The issue is to try to get back to a place where there is some confidence that this is not an effort to dictate or prejudge the final status outcome.”
Ms. Rice added that the Palestinians had also been failing to live up to some of their commitments under the so-called road map for Middle East peace.

She met separately on Sunday with top Palestinian and Israeli officials, as well as in trilateral talks. More discussions were planned for Monday.

Despite her concerns, she said she was impressed at the depth and seriousness of the negotiations. She also addressed the growing skepticism of the chances of success. “I can’t say yes, absolutely, they will get an agreement,” Ms. Rice said. “No one can say that. But the idea that they have no chance of getting an agreement by the end of the year, I just think is not right.”

On the Palestinian winners of the Fulbright award, the American government’s flagship international education study grant, Israel permitted four students to exit Gaza, but told three others that they were security risks and could not enter Israel in order to fly to the United States. The Israelis declined to give details of their concerns to the students or to journalists, but they did say they were sharing them with American officials.

“It continues to be my belief that all of the Fulbrights should be able to take up their fellowships,” Ms. Rice said. “I consider this to be a very high priority to get this resolved.”

Maj. Peter Lerner, spokesman for the section of Israel’s Defense Ministry that handles Palestinian civilian affairs, said Shin Bet, the internal security service, had determined that the three students were sufficient risks that they could not leave Gaza and enter Israel. Israel’s policy toward Gaza is to bar all but emergency humanitarian movement in and out to pressure Hamas, the governing party.

But the American government had vetted all of the Fulbright winners for security as well as for academic achievement. Ms. Rice said that unless there was something significant she did not know about the three men that the Israelis could present to her, she wanted them to be permitted to leave.

The three — Zuhair Abu Shaaban, 24, Osama Dawoud, 25, and Fidaa Abed, 23 — studied at the Islamic University of Gaza, a Hamas stronghold, which is perhaps the reason Israel has concerns about them. But all said in interviews on Sunday that they had studied there because it was the only institution in Gaza that offered the engineering fields they wanted to pursue and that they had never been involved in Hamas or politics of any kind.

“I don’t support Hamas,” Mr. Dawoud said. He is hoping to be able to accept the offer to study for a doctorate in environmental engineering at the University of Utah.
Mr. Abu Shaaban, who has been accepted into a master’s program in electrical engineering at the University of Connecticut, said that he had been permitted to cross into Israel, where security officials interrogated him for two hours.

They told him they would let him leave if he gave them information on several dozen members of his extended family who they believed were associated with Hamas. Mr. Abu Shaaban said he had told them that there were more than 10,000 Gazans with his last name and of those on the list given to him, he recognized only 4. They then sent him home, he said.

“I am not guilty,” he said Sunday. “Please tell everyone I have nothing to do with Hamas. All I want in life is to get an education and come back to serve my community.”

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