Tel Aviv -- Israel's foreign minister wants his country to get rid of all its responsibility over the Gaza Strip, handing border control to the international community and turning the Hamas-run Palestinian coastal enclave into a fully "separate" and "independent" entity, it was reported Friday. Avigdor Lieberman, of the ultra-nationalist Israel Beiteinu party, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's largest coalition partner, wants to hand over security inspections of goods and people entering Gaza by land and sea to the international community, reported Israel's biggest-selling daily, Yediot Ahronot. Lieberman, whose goal is international recognition that Israel has ended its occupation of Gaza, plans to propose his initiative to European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, slated to visit Gaza Sunday, said the daily. An international force should prevent weapons smuggling into Gaza, said the daily, quoting a classified Foreign Ministry document. The hardline politician also wants to give up Israel's stipulation that all ships must have their cargo checked in the southern Israeli port of Ashdod, before the goods can continue over land to Gaza. Instead, he wants to reopen Gaza's long inoperative port. Ships would have to have their cargo checked by international inspectors at ports in Cyprus and Greece, rather than by the Israelis themselves in Ashdod, said Yediot. He also wants international organisations to build another power plant, so that Gaza would no longer need electricity from Israel, a desalination plant, and a sewage cleansing plant, said the daily. It added that meant effectively granting legitimacy to the de- facto government of the radical Islamist Hamas movement in Gaza, because the international community would have to work with it, not with Israel or the Palestinian Authority regarding Gaza. Lieberman would also have international jurists study what conditions Israel, which withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005 and evacuated and destroyed all its 21 settlements there, would have to fulfil for the international community to recognise that it no longer occupies Gaza. So far, it has not done so because Israel continues to fully control the strip's borders, air space and sea, even though it no longer has a military, nor a settler presence inside. After the 2005 pullout, plans where raised for the reopening of Gaza's port and airport, as well as for large-scale development projects, but rocket and mortar attacks from the strip prompted Israel to withdraw its support for those. It was not immediately clear whether Netanyahu and his ruling Likud party would back the plan. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor, asked by the German Press Agency dpa, noted the plan was not official government or ministry policy, but appeared to be a personal initiative by Lieberman.
