GAZA CITY, 6 May 2003 — A colonel in the Palestinian preventive security services was arrested by the Israeli Army at a Gaza Strip checkpoint yesterday, Israeli and Palestinian security officials said.
Col. Suleiman Abu Mutlak was arrested by Israeli forces manning a checkpoint near the Gush Katif Jewish settlement block in the south, Palestinian officials said. The Israeli Army confirmed it had captured a “wanted Palestinian,” but gave no more detail.
Israeli public radio said Abu Mutlak was a senior member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement. Preventive security is tasked with stopping attacks against Israeli targets.
Last month, new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmud Abbas named Mohammed Dahlan, the former chief of the preventive security forces in Gaza, as his security minister. Dahlan, like Abbas a Fatah member, resigned from his Gaza post last July after clashing with the Fatah leader Arafat.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad said in Beirut yesterday its Damascus offices were still open, two days after US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Syria had ordered Jihad’s offices shut. “Nothing has changed.
The status of our bureaus remains the same,” Abu Imad Al-Rifai, the movement’s representative in Beirut, told AFP. Powell told reporters there on Saturday after a visit to Damascus that Syrian authorities assured him that offices of some radical anti-Israeli groups had been closed, without naming them.
“They did some closures,” following pressure from the United States, he said. “I expect them to do more with respect to access and appearances of various officials of these organizations.”
A senior State Department official accompanying Powell said Syrian President Bashar Assad had taken action against offices of Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.
Bashar had told Powell that the closures, to be accompanied by limiting the television appearances by the groups’ leaders, were “permanent,” he said, while stressing however that Washington was not yet convinced on the matter. Hamas officials, contacted in Beirut and Damascus, declined yesterday to comment on the status of the movement’s offices in the Syrian capital.
“The US is ignoring the root of the problem, which is Israeli occupation,” said the Hamas representative here, Ossama Hamdan. “The return of (Palestinian) refugees is the solution. Then there will no longer be a need for offices.”
A Syrian government newspaper called yesterday on Washington to pressure Israel to withdraw from Arab lands captured in the 1967 Middle East War.
“To guarantee security, stability and peace, pressure must first be exerted on Israel, which is the root source and cause of all tensions,” Tishrin wrote. The government daily was hitting back after Powell’s visit to Damascus and Beirut.
