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Israeli attack on Jericho jail sparks uprising in Gaza and West Bank
Six Palestinian prisoners, including a militant accused of the murder of an Israeli government minister in 2001, surrendered last night after a nine-hour armed siege that began when British monitors abandoned the jail where the men were being held.
The siege had triggered a wave of protest attacks and abductions directed against foreigners across Gaza and the West Bank and there were heavy exchanges of fire outside the Jericho jail which claimed the lives of two Palestinians.
Militants stoned and set fire to the British Council building in Gaza as foreigners began to flee from the Strip last night to avoid further reprisals.
The prisoners, among them Ahmed Saadat, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the faction behind the murder of Israel's Tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi, walked out of the jail shortly after nightfall after a day of high tension in which Israeli forces used repeated artillery and machine-gun fire to reinforce their threat to kill the men if they failed to turn themselves in.
During the day, Palestinian gunmen seized a number of foreigners from hotels in Gaza. Palestinian security officials said they included a Swiss Red Cross worker, two Australian teachers, two French medical workers and three journalists - two French and a South Korean.
The Australian teachers were subsequently released. A British diplomat said there were no reports of UK nationals being seized but they were trying to bring two Britons back into Israel, one from Gaza, one from the West Bank.
Gunmen in Jenin in the West Bank kidnapped Douglas Johnson, a professor of English at the American University, and initially threatened to kill him if Israel harmed Ahmed Saadat. Mr Johnson, who was later released, said he sympathised with Palestinian anger over the Israeli operation in Jericho.
More
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article351363.ece
Militants stoned and set fire to the British Council building in Gaza as foreigners began to flee from the Strip last night to avoid further reprisals.
The prisoners, among them Ahmed Saadat, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the faction behind the murder of Israel's Tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi, walked out of the jail shortly after nightfall after a day of high tension in which Israeli forces used repeated artillery and machine-gun fire to reinforce their threat to kill the men if they failed to turn themselves in.
During the day, Palestinian gunmen seized a number of foreigners from hotels in Gaza. Palestinian security officials said they included a Swiss Red Cross worker, two Australian teachers, two French medical workers and three journalists - two French and a South Korean.
The Australian teachers were subsequently released. A British diplomat said there were no reports of UK nationals being seized but they were trying to bring two Britons back into Israel, one from Gaza, one from the West Bank.
Gunmen in Jenin in the West Bank kidnapped Douglas Johnson, a professor of English at the American University, and initially threatened to kill him if Israel harmed Ahmed Saadat. Mr Johnson, who was later released, said he sympathised with Palestinian anger over the Israeli operation in Jericho.
More
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article351363.ece
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Leader
Wednesday March 15, 2006
The Guardian
The sequence of events that led to the confrontation at the jail in Jericho yesterday, and to protests, arson and kidnapping elsewhere in the West Bank and Gaza, is not entirely clear. But it seems likely that Hamas, still in the process of forming a government after its victory in the Palestinian elections, sensed that it could win a small victory over the Israelis by releasing the militants held in Jericho. The men include Ahmed Saadat, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who the Israelis say ordered the killing of an Israeli minister, and Fuad Shobaki, who they say organised a big shipment of arms to the Occupied Territories that was intercepted at sea.
The group was originally transferred to Jericho as part of the deal that ended the siege of Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah in 2002. Arafat would not agree to their being seized by the Israelis, and the Israelis would not agree to let them go free, so the compromise was detention in a Palestinian prison under the supervision of British and American monitors. The Palestinian Supreme Court later ordered their release, as they had not been charged with any offence, to which the Israeli response was that, if they were, they would be the subjects of targeted assassinations. The men stayed in prison, in effect, to protect their lives. Britain, the foreign secretary said yesterday, felt that conditions in Jericho were too loose, as well as that our monitors might themselves be potentially in danger. What he did not say, but which can be speculated, is that Hamas may have calculated that in the new situation following the January elections and with a de facto ceasefire more or less holding, Israel might not carry out the assassination threat, so that it was now safe to release them. Jack Straw may have calculated that the British could not be party to that so it was better to withdraw.
The decision to pull out the monitors then triggered the Israeli action, and the Palestinian protests which followed. The unhappy consequence is that the prospect of achieving enough in the way of pragmatic agreements on different topics between the Israelis and the Palestinians to allow, at least for a while, co-existence without much violence has been damaged. So has the the standing of some western countries, particularly Britain, seen by many Palestinians as having colluded with Israel in the attack on the jail. Since they are prominent among the available mediators between Hamas and the Israelis, that is doubly unfortunate. The background to all this is that the structure which for years brought some order to the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis is in almost total disarray. It was based on the assumption that there would be at some stage a final peace between two states, progress toward which would be pushed along by the international community, which would also provide enough economic aid both to keep the Palestinians from economic collapse and to give some leverage over Palestinian decisions. Successive Israeli governments dealt that structure a series of heavy blows.
More
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1730921,00.html