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New govt. in 10 days, says Arafat

Jerusalem May 28. The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, vowed to have a new government within 10 days during a meeting of the Palestinian leadership in his Ramallah headquarters, the cabinet secretary, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, said today. "The cabinet should change within a week, at latest in 10 days," he said.

The move, decided on at a meeting last night, would aim at streamlining the Government as well as making its ministries more efficient and frugal, the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam said. Twenty ministerial portfolios was deemed "an appropriate number" during the meeting, the paper said. It was also proposed that "various political factions" participate in the new Government as well as non-political figures, so as to "bring in new blood and vitality in governmental work and extend its popular base," the daily added.

Mr. Arafat also said the Palestinian Authority's various security services would be reorganised, without indicating any specific date, according to the report. A Top Arafat aide, Nabil Abu Rudeina, added that an exact date for presidential and general elections would be announced within the coming days. "We have been working night and day and a date for the elections will be delivered in a few days," he said.

The Palestinian leadership recommended yesterday that the elections be held in December this year. "The elections for the legislative council and the presidency can take place in December 2002," the leadership said in a statement after the Ramallah meeting chaired by Mr. Arafat.

Meanwhile, two Israelis, including a three-year-old girl, were killed on Monday when a Palestinian suicide bomber struck a shopping mall in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tiqvah, officials said. The identity of the second victim was not immediately known.

The blast, the first to hit this suburb northwest of Tel Aviv, in 20 months of the Palestinian uprising, injured more than 20 people, several of them seriously. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Mr. Arafat's Fatah group, claimed responsibility for the suicide attack.

"The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claim the martyr operation carried out by fighters in Petah Tikvah, in a phone call to the Al-Manar channel," Hezbollah's television station announced, without giving further details. Israeli television showed pictures of a child's pushchair, blackened by the blast but still intact outside the small cafe where the bomber blew himself to pieces.

Israeli public radio said police had sealed the area of and were searching for a possible second suicide bomber. It was the first suicide bomber to succeed in hitting is target since May 22, when a young Palestinian killed himself and two Israelis in Rishon Letsion, another Tel Aviv suburb. — AFP

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