OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 13 August — An Israeli military court approved the expulsion of three Palestinians from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip yesterday in the first application of a controversial new deterrent policy.
The court in the West Bank settlement of Beit El made its decision in the case of Intissar Adjuri, 34, from the Askar refugee camp near Nablus, whose brother is wanted in connection with a July ambush of a Jewish settler bus in which nine people were killed.
But the ruling also applies to her brother Kifah, 28, and Abdel Nasser Assidi, 34, from the village of Tel, public television added.
Asked by AFP, an Israeli Army spokesman said he could not confirm the television’s report insisting the "process is under way."
In other developments, Hamas vowed to continue attacks inside Israel as Palestinian factions met to forge a unified leadership in their 22-month-old uprising for independence.
Some moderate Palestinians at the Gaza meetings wanted to include in a draft manifesto a call to halt attacks on civilians in Israel, but Hamas and other factions that carry out such assaults rejected that idea, Palestinian sources said.
"The soldier who attacks me here, I must attack him there (in Israel)," Hamas’s leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin told Reuters at his home in Gaza City.
The debate among the 13 Palestinian factions underlined the difficulties faced by President Yasser Arafat.
The draft manifesto under negotiation by the factions states that "resistance is a legitimate right against the (Israeli) occupation and settlement" and also cited "political work as a means to reach our national goals".
The document does not specifically call for an end to attacks inside Israel, something that Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) made clear they would not accept.
"The manifesto stresses the legitimacy of all sorts of resistance. It does not exclude anything," PFLP leader Jamil Majdalawi said.
The groups were also trying to create a unified leadership to steer the uprising and advise Arafat and the Palestinian Authority on upcoming elections and reforms demanded by the United States and Israel.
As talks went on behind closed doors, a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Arafat’s Fatah movement, was shot dead by Israeli forces near the West Bank town of Jenin and an Israeli soldier was injured by a roadside bomb in the same area.
In Israeli politics, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon raised the prospect of calling early elections in January unless Parliament passes his belt-tightening budget for an economy battered by recession and Palestinian uprising.
