JERUSALEM (Islamweb & News Agencies) - An Israeli helicopter gunship killed a Palestinian during a battle between occupation soldiers and Resistance men in the West Bank on Wednesday in fresh violence that overshadowed a rare session of security talks between the sides.
Israeli and Palestinian security officials held a meeting on the Gaza Strip border at which a senior Palestinian security official said they had agreed to allow repairs of Gaza international airport, damaged by Israeli occupation troops.
The official, Major General Abdel-Razek al-Majaydeh, also said Israel agreed to extend the hours of the Rafah border crossing to Egypt and ease curbs on Gazan workers and merchants entering Israel. Israeli officials had no immediate comment.
The Palestinian Authority accused Israel of trying to ''destroy stability and calm'' by maintaining a crippling blockade of Palestinian areas and sending its forces into Palestinian-ruled areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The gunbattle and an earlier Israeli raid on a West Bank village challenged comments by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres that his recent talks with a Palestinian official meant relations between the two sides were no longer at rock bottom.
``Chances for peace had reached the lowest point, the zero point, in relations between the Palestinian authorities and Israel,'' Peres said during a visit to Ukraine.
``But I think we have departed from zero point and begun to move,'' the so-called lone dove in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's ruling coalition said about his talks with Ahmed Korei, speaker of the Palestinian parliament.
The Peres-Korei talks grabbed weekend headlines when Israel's biggest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, reported the two men had drafted an interim peace plan for a Palestinian state on 42 percent of the West Bank and most of the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian officials said the two men had put together talking points for a permanent deal.
``I cannot talk now about encouraging positions, nor can I say that these meetings have yielded results, but there are ideas under discussion and the Palestinian leadership is studying and considering them,'' Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo told Voice of Palestine radio on Wednesday.
Abed Rabbo has said the reported peace plan, which falls far short of Palestinian territorial demands for a state, would be a non-starter because it would keep Palestinians in cantons.