Arafat says peace talks to resume

CAIRO (Reuter) - Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), said yesterday that talks on Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho, suspended last week, would reconvene in Cairo. Egypt said they would take place today.

'An ad hoc committee will meet in Cairo soon to try to resolve problems that led to the suspension of the Taba talks,' Mr Arafat said in Cairo after meeting the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak. The PLO leader, who later left for Tunis, declined to say when the talks would resume. But the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Amr Moussa, later said the talks, by special four- man teams from either side, would take place today.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank near Hebron, Arab gunmen fired on the car of a right-wing rabbi yesterday, wounding him, killing his driver, and prompting Jewish vigilante protests in which two Arabs were hurt. Jewish settlers took to the streets in anger at the daylight attack on the rabbi, Haim Druckman, a former Israeli MP. Mr Druckman, 60, who represented the National Religious Party in parliament for 11 years until 1988, was injured by bullet fragments in the arm and shoulder.