Al-Zahar visit cancelled

A day earlier, a Jordanian government spokesman said security forces had seized rocket launchers and other weapons from a Hamas arms cache.

The Islamist faction, which does not recognise Israel and took over the Palestinian government on March 29 after winning January elections, was also accused of using Jordan to engage in anti-Israeli activities.

A visit by the new Palestinian foreign minister and senior Hamas leader, Mahmoud al-Zahar, was scrapped as a result.

A Hamas minister said Jordan had made up the accusations to enforce a boycott against the Palestinian government. The United States and Israel are boycotting the government.

"I advise our brothers in Jordan to stop making cheap lies to justify their disgraceful subservience to Israel and the United States," said the minister, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Brotherhood comment

A leader of Jordan's largest opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, denounced Amman's decision.

Jamil Abu Bakr accused the kingdom of having caved in to "American and Zionist pressures on Arabs to isolate the Palestinian Hamas-led government".

Al-Zahar himself was more conciliatory, saying: "Our relation with Jordan does not stop [because] of cancelling or postponing a visit."

But challenged by reporters on a visit to Saudi Arabia, he said: "Hamas does not stash weapons in any Arab country."

Dire straits

Al-Zahar is touring Arab states to try to raise funds after the US and several countries, mostly Western, suspended direct aid, saying Hamas must renounce violence and recognise Israel and past interim peace deals.



Al-Zahar's visit to Jordan would have been the first by a Hamas leader since the nation expelled the group's leadership in 1999.

Hamas's politburo now has its headquarters in Damascus.

Hamas has a large following in Palestinian refugee camps across Jordan. Much of Jordan's population is of Palestinian origin.

The Palestinian foreign minister had kicked off his tour of the region in Cairo last Friday but his counterpart, Ahmed Abul Gheit, said he was too busy for meeting.

Egypt is the only other Arab country to have signed a peace treaty with Israel and the biggest recipient of US aid after the Jewish State.

Arab banks' boycott

Amman's accusations of arms smuggling came less than two weeks after the Jordan-based Arab Bank stopped all financial dealings with the Palestinian government, Palestinian banking officials said

A banking official in the West Bank told Al Jazeera.net that the Arab Bank was afraid of possible US retributions.

"They [the US] consider Hamas a terrorist organisation, and if we deal with the movement and its government, we would be subject to an open war by the Americans.

"They would hold us responsible for every single Israeli casualty for the past 20 years," he said, asking to remain anonymous.

"We are not ready for this disaster on behalf of the Arab world."

Branches of the bank operating in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been instructed to forbid their clients from making inter-branch transactions except when the beneficiary is a first-degree relative of the depositor.

The measures angered the Palestinian government, with one official at the ministry of finance saying: "We didn't know that our banks are also controlled by the United States."

The Israeli English-language daily newspaper Haaretz reported earlier this month that Arab-owned banks holding Palestinian Authority accounts had begun trying to persuade the PA to withdraw its money.

It said the measure had apparently come out of fear that the US and Western European countries will impose sanctions against them for holding terrorist funds.

Any hope of creating a viable, independent Palestinian state is being destroyed by Israeli bulldozers, barbed wire and concrete walls, Davies was quoted saying by the local Oldham Evening Chronicle.

The Lib Dem MEP was part of an all-party delegation from the Strasbourg-based European Parliament which visited occupied West Bank last week.

"Palestinian land is being carved up and communities isolated. The people liken themselves to hamsters kept in cages connected by tubes that are opened and shut at the whim of their Israeli masters.

Economic progress is impossible," he said.

"Towns are being physically divided and people denied the right to travel between them. Israel continues to steal land to expand illegal settlements served by roads which Palestinians are forbidden to use," Davies said about his findings.

During the visit, MEPs held meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, and newly elected members of the legislative council, including supporters of both Fatah and Hamas.

The Lib Dem member for northwest England warned about the recent EU decision to suspend payments to the Palestinian Authority, following the election victory of Hamas.

He said that after visiting Auschwitz concentration camp in Germany last year, he found it 'very difficult to understand why those whose history is one of such terrible oppression appear not to care that they have themselves become oppressors'.

Davies also revealed that during his visit to the West Bank, he was asked repeatedly about EU double standards -- why Palestinians are penalized while no action is taken to stop Israel flouting international law.

"If we don't help the Palestinian Territories, others like Iran will do so. And, on the other hand, we risk pushing the Palestinian people towards radicalism and that's not what we want and that's why we should continue to help them."

President Jacques Chirac said Hamas must see violence had no future and also urged Israel to resist unilateral action, targeted assassinations of Palestinian figures and to halt colonisation of Palestinian territories.

"We call on Hamas to understand that violence leads to a dead end and (urge it) to continue its transition towards political action," Chirac told Egypt's al-Ahram newspaper in an interview published ahead a two-day visit to Egypt on Wednesday.

"It agreed to take part in elections, now it must go through with this logic," he said. "There is no alternative."

When they meet later on Wednesday Chirac will press his host Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, to try to convince Hamas to commit to the Middle East peace process.

The United States and European Union have cut direct aid to the Hamas-led government for failing to meet their demands that Hamas recognise Israel, abandon violence and respect existing Palestinian peace agreements with Israel.

Hamas, the militant Islamic group that won Palestinian elections in January, has refused to amend its charter calling for destruction of Israel. It also angered Israel and the West by describing as "self defence" Monday's suicide bombing by another group that killed nine people in Tel Aviv.

"For sure, the salaries are my main priority, but it is a problem," the minister, Omar Abdel Razek, told The Associated Press. "It's a puzzling problem. You can't do anything. You can only wait. So I have a strange feeling. For the first time, I find myself in such a dilemma. But I hope that God will provide a solution."

The government employees are the backbone of the Palestinian labour force, and their salaries sustain about one-third of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Abdel Razek said that between Hamas' election victory in January and its assumption of power in late March, the outgoing Fatah government inflated the already bloated public work force further, adding another 9,000 employees. He said the number of security officers was actually 80,000, rather than the 60,000 listed by the Fatah government.