BEIT JALA, West Bank, 1 July — Israeli soldiers yesterday dismantled a liaison office with the Palestinians for the Bethlehem region, ordering the staff out of their offices and locking it up, a news agency photographer said. Israeli troops in the West Bank also arrested hundreds of Palestinians yesterday while maintaining strict curfews in all cities in the Palestinian autonomous territory except Jericho.
Soldiers entered the building in Beit Jala where Israelis and Palestinians share the offices, ordered between eight and 10 Palestinian staff out, locked the room and left with the keys, the photographer at the scene said. The Israelis also confiscated the furniture and filing cabinets and removed two Palestinian flags that flew over the building, he added. Palestinian security sources later said the soldiers raised the Israeli flag on the building. Israeli military officials quoted by the Israeli public radio also said the Beit Jala move was a one-off that does not reflect any plan to shut down all the offices on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
An army statement said three Palestinian policemen were ejected from the premises. The Palestinian head of the liaison committee, Gen. Ribhe Arafat, described the closure as “dangerous” and a blow to the 1993 Oslo Accords. “If they close down the offices, it would be a very dangerous act by the Israelis,” Arafat told reporters in Ramallah, calling for the army reopen the Beit Jala office.
Plans for Israel to dismantle the last vestiges of security cooperation between the two sides was first reported yesterday by Israel’s best-selling newspaper Yediot Aharonot. The daily said the move showed Israel’s aim was to take sole responsibility for security in the territories.
A bomb exploded along the route of a passenger train south of Tel Aviv yesterday, injuring two passengers, while the Israeli Army rounded up Palestinian men in a West Bank refugee camp for questioning. The blast occurred around two kilometers north of Lod station, shattering the windows of one carriage and causing a halt in rail traffic, Israeli police spokesman Gil Kleiman told AFP.
A Palestinian in the area was detained for questioning, local police official Haim Cohen said, adding that 500 passengers were on the train when the five-kilogram (11-pound) bomb packed with scraps of metal detonated. A high state of alert gripped Jerusalem late Saturday after police received warnings of an imminent attack on the city’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish area, police sources said.
Troops in the Amari refugee camp near Ramallah herded males between the ages of 15 and 50 into a school yard for interrogation, according to Palestinian sources. Elsewhere in Ramallah, the army detained for questioning 27 Palestinians who were riding in two ambulances in the city, military sources said.
Five other Palestinians were arrested overnight by the army during separate sweeps on the West Bank, military sources said. Soldiers also took over a private house in the West Bank town of Dura overnight, after ordering its owners to evacuate the building, witnesses said.
The house is located on the main road leading to the southern city of Hebron, where the army on Saturday blew up a Palestinian Authority administrative compound, which it had besieged to flush out activists.
In the West Bank town of Nablus, an army bulldozer demolished the home of a Hamas activist, witnesses said. The army surrounded the home of Amar Masri, 30, with tanks and called for residents to evacuate the house, before the troops opened machine-gun fire and then flattened the building with the bulldozer, they added.
