Palestinian street expects result

The Palestinians expect that at the new joint Israeli-Palestinian committee, Israel will agree to discuss prisoners defined as having "blood on their hands." So far there has been an Israeli refusal in principle to free such prisoners.

The main Palestinian demand is freedom for 237 such prisoners in jail since before the Oslo agreement, most of them sentenced to life in jail. There is a great deal of tension in the prisons among these prisoners, and there were demonstrations in a number of places in the West Bank and Gaza yesterday by prisoner families.

"If Abu Mazen and the committee agree on 900 prisoners who will go free soon, and some are just Palestinians who were caught working illegally in Israel, we'll throw shoes at him," said a Palestinian in an interview yesterday on a Gulf state news show.

Palestinian spokesmen tried yesterday to lower expectations from the summit, saying in official statements that the gathering in Sharm is the start of a process, not the end of one. But in some places in the territories, Palestinian journalists were reporting that the public is anticipating a real change that will be felt on the ground, and maybe even a return to the days before the intifada.

The street corner talk yesterday in the territories was about the hope for an end to the construction of the separation fence, removal of checkpoints, and the return of large numbers of Palestinians to work in Israel.

"The continuation of the construction of the separation walls will be considered by the people to be a violation of the cease-fire," one East Jerusalem journalist predicted last night.

In Abu Mazen's office, there was a certain degree of disappointment that there would not be any high-ranking American presence at the summit. There had been an expectation that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would show up and add her voice to those of the host, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah, pressing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to increase the goodwill gestures to the Palestinians to help stabilize the cease-fire.

Aside from the preparations for the solution to the issue of the wanted men, returning the Palestinians expelled from the West Bank to Gaza, and permission for the deportees from Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity to return home, Palestinian officials were talking yesterday about Abu Mazen raising the issue of a settlement freeze, according to the road map, and the issue of the freedom of movement, the fence, and the checkpoints in the densely populated Arab areas around East Jerusalem.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/537306.html