We will have to wait until the evening hours to assess the situation and then make a decision.” Further meetings were due to discuss the arrest of militants, which according to the Israeli Defence Ministry remained “a source of dissension”.Speaking at the opening of an art gallery in Gaza City yesterday, the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said he would see if the Israelis kept their part of the agreement. “It wouldn’t be the first time they neglect to fulfil an agreement,” he said.Israel launched incursions into six Palestinian-controlled towns to hunt down and arrest the militants who killed the ultra-nationalist Mr Zeevi. The radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said it carried out the assassination in retaliation for the killing of its political leader, Abu Ali Mustafa, in August.So far the incursions have left 37 Palestinians dead, angered the Bush administration, which is worried that further unrest will undermine support among Arab nations for its anti-terrorism campaign, and failed to capture Mr Zeevi’s killers.The offer to leave Bethlehem and Beit Jala was first made during a meeting on Friday in Tel Aviv of Israeli and Palestinian security commanders and an American official. “It was decided that the [Israeli defence] forces would withdraw from Bethlehem and Beit Jala on Saturday night,” the Israeli Defence Ministry said.

“The Palestinian Authority will take upon itself the responsibility to retain the quiet in the area.”Ahmed Eid, a Palestinian security official in Bethlehem who was at the meeting, said the Israelis did not give an exact time for the withdrawal, but had promised to ease restrictions on the movement of Bethlehem area residents.US President George Bush was pleased with the first step of the partial withdrawal and urged Israel to complete it, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said in Washington. Mr Bush also called on Mr Arafat to “make a 100 per cent effort to reduce the violence”.The Palestinian leadership issued a statement late on Friday urging all Palestinian factions to respect the ceasefire and calling on international observers to monitor the truce and check that Israel withdrew as promised. It also asked for an international committee to investigate the killing of five Palestinian policemen on Wednesday on the West Bank village of Beit Rima.Israeli officials had said Israel would not withdraw from the West Bank towns until Mr Arafat arrested and handed over the militants responsible for Mr Zeevi’s death.. Leading members of Britain’s Jewish community are locked in an angry dispute over Israel’s role in the international crisis.

Leading members of Britain’s Jewish community are locked in an angry dispute over Israel’s role in the international crisis.
A prominent liberal, Rabbi Dr David Goldberg, has provoked consternation by describing Israel as the “last colonial power in the world”, a “fact” which had left many Jews questioning their unconditional support of the country.An passionate argument has followed, with the pages of the Jewish Chronicle carrying demands that he has no right to criticise Israel in the current climate.Another liberal, Rabbi Dr Sidney Brichto, wrote in the paper that those who disagree with Israeli policy should “keep their feelings to themselves”.”When leading Jews start criticising the behaviour of the Israeli government it gives the green light for those who are not friends of Israel,” he said.Former Labour shadow minister Gerald Kaufman, a lifelong supporter of Israel, entered the debate with a statement that he would never visit the country again because its current policies “make me despair”. The writer A N Wilson followed up by openly questioning the right of Israel to exist because “it never was a state”.His comments drew a passionate response from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Britain, who said Israel existed because “for a thousand years Jews had been persecuted in Christian Europe, from the first crusade to Hitler’s Final Solution”. But yesterday, speaking to The Independent on Sunday, Rabbi Goldberg, senior rabbi at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood, London, repeated his criticisms of Israel and defended his right to speak out.He said: “We are perhaps the most critical people on Earth of each other and of ourselves, yet when it comes to Israel it is a golden calf and all our critical faculties go. It is probably due to a great deal of insecurity from the Holocaust.