Pope says holy city sites need protection

Israel last night dismissed as "unnecessary" a call by Pope John Paul II yesterday for international guarantees to safeguard the special status of the holy places in Jerusalem.

Israel last night dismissed as "unnecessary" a call by Pope John Paul II yesterday for international guarantees to safeguard the special status of the holy places in Jerusalem.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman, Aviv Shir-On, said that such guarantees were not among the ideas being negotiated by the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, at Camp David. "International guarantees are not needed," he insisted. "Access to the holy places has never been better than under Israeli control since 1967."

In his weekly Sunday address to pilgrims, the Pope said: "Only a special statute, internationally guaranteed, can effectively preserve the most sacred areas of the holy city." Such guarantees, he added, would "assure freedom of religion and of worship for all the faithful who... look to Jerusalem as a crossroads of peace and coexistence".

The Pope's message echoes an appeal last week by the patriarchs of the three main churches in Jerusalem, the Roman Catholic and the Greek and Armenian Orthodox, who also suggested that they might be represented at Camp David and any future negotiations on the fate of Jerusalem.

Father Ra'ed, secretary to the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, clarified last night that the Pope was not advocating internationalisation of the city - a position dropped by the Vatican when it established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1994. The church, he told The Independent, was seeking international guarantees of the freedom of Christians, Jews and Muslims to practise their religions with free access to their holy places. The church wanted to see Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and Palestine, with no borders.