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BERLIN, Sunday (AFP, Reuters)

Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa called Palestinian suicide attacks a violation of the Geneva Convention and encouraged Palestinians to focus instead on military resistance in the occupied territories, in an interview to be published Sunday.

"The fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the killing of civilians in wartime," Mussa said in the interview, to appear in the German weekly Welt am Sonntag.

"The resistance should focus on the tanks and all those who have illegally appropriated territories in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank," he said. As long as Israelis remain on Palestinian land, he said, tensions will remain that can provoke suicide attacks.

"The only thing to do is to proclaim a Palestinian state," Mussa said.

Meanwhile Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, whose country is about to take over the EU presidency, will present a new Middle East peace plan to his US counterpart Colin Powell in Washington on Wednesday, he told a Danish newspaper. Denmark, is pushing for a series of meetings of experts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rather than the holding of major peace conference, Moeller told the weekly Soendagsavisen.

Denmark "will propose, on behalf of the EU, that we begin with series of meetings on specific subjects, like for example the question of Palestinian refugees, the security problems between Israelis and Palestinians, the status of Jerusalem, etc..," he said.

Under the plan, the United States, the EU, Russia, Arab countries, Israel and the Palestinians will take part in these meetings, which should lead to the organising of a large international peace conference.

Earlier Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said he had given orders to uproot 10 rogue "outposts" that Jewish settlers have established in the West Bank.

Jewish settlers immediately criticised the move as a concession to a Palestinian uprising which has seen frequent attacks on settlers on occupied land. Ben-Eliezer appeared to be trying to recover for his Labour Party some of the left-of-centre political ground which dovish members say it has abandoned while governing in coalition with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Meanwhile Israeli troops arrested more than 40 Palestinians, including three with close ties to the radical Islamic movement Hamas, during its sweep of West Bank towns on Saturday, Palestinian and Israeli military sources said.

Israeli tanks and armoured personnel carriers entered the village of Tammun at dawn, imposing a curfew and conducting house-to-house searches for suspects, the mayor told AFP. More than 20 Palestinians were rounded up in the village, south of Jenin, where troops took over the local high school and turned it into a military position, Bashar Audeh said. Earlier Israeli troops were searching for the bodies of 15 Palestinian militants believed killed when the army used tonnes of explosives to destroy a Palestinian security building in the West Bank.

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