GAZA CITY, 8 January 2003 — Israel yesterday confined senior Palestinian officials to their cities and barred all other Palestinians under 35 from leaving the West Bank or Gaza Strip. The army also killed three Palestinians during an incursion in the Gaza Strip overnight.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Israel had issued orders to Palestinian Authority ministers and senior officials not to leave their cities as part of a plan to use Sunday’s bloody bombing to smash what remains of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. "This is new proof that Israel wants to destroy the Palestinian Authority," he said. No Israeli officials were available to comment on the new measures, although a senior Palestinian security official in Rafah said that even women under 35 were being refused permission to cross into Egypt.
And an official at the Palestinian Ministry of Labor in Gaza said that 4,000 workers aged under 35 who had been previously allowed to enter Israel to work had been turned back, with only 1,350 others allowed through.
The Israeli Navy also imposed a blockade on the Gaza coast, forbidding fishermen to go out in the Mediterranean, Palestinian officials said.
Israel, which reoccupied most of the West Bank more than six months ago and exerts close control on the Gaza Strip, said Monday it would further tighten restrictions on Palestinian movement after the Tel Aviv bombing which killed 22 people as well as the bombers.
It prevented a top-level Palestinian delegation, including Erekat, from traveling to London for talks on internal reforms with other regional and international players, at the invitation of Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The ban was heavily criticized by London, provoking a heated exchange between Israeli Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his British counterpart Jack Straw, but the United States refrained from condemning it.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday urged his Israeli counterpart Ariel Sharon to allow Palestinian leaders to attend the conference in London next week. Blair made the appeal in a letter to Sharon.
The latest restrictions were imposed as Israel carried out a raid into the Maghazi refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, shooting dead three Palestinians, according to Palestinian officials.
The bodies of Nassim Abu Meluha, 25, and Baker Abu Khadura, 25, from the Palestinian national security forces, were found yesterday morning while 28-year-old Iyad Abu Zayad was killed in his car by heavy machine gun fire from an Israeli helicopter, the sources said.
The Israeli Army yesterday dynamited two houses belonging to Palestinians near the northern West Bank city of Nablus, Palestinian witnesses said.
Troops blew up a house in the village of Beit Furik which used to belong to Haddash Abu Assaud, a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was yesterday linked for the first time to corruption allegations, deepening a scandal undermining support for his Likud party as it gears up for national elections later this month.
Sharon and his son, Gilad, are suspected of deception, fraud, breach of trust and receiving bribes, according to the daily newspaper, Haaretz, which cited a document obtained from the Israeli Justice Ministry.
