RAMALLAH, West Bank, 4 June 2003 — Israel released more than 90 Palestinian detainees yesterday, including the longest-serving prisoner and several members of the security services, as part of conciliatory measures aimed at boosting the implementation of the peace road map. Israel announced it had started to release around 100 Palestinian administrative detainees held in the military camps of Ofer, in the West Bank, and Ketziot, in southern Israel, the day ahead of a crucial summit in Jordan.
Prisoner sources inside the camps confirmed that at least 91 prisoners were freed, most of them former members of the Palestinian security services, and AFP correspondents witnessed their return to the West Bank at various checkpoints.
Palestinian Minister for Prisoners Affairs Hisham Abdelrazeq welcomed the measure: “It is a very positive step which creates a good climate for negotiations,” he told AFP. “As far as I know, there are 1,700 to 2,000 members of the security branches in Israeli prisons. It is important to release them, but we are working for the release of all Palestinian prisoners,” Abdelrazeq stressed.
The Palestinian security services were decimated by Israel’s response to the Palestinian uprising over the past 32 months, and jailed policemen are much needed to rebuild the security apparatus under new Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. Israel is expected to hand over control of some reoccupied territories to the Palestinians in the coming weeks, as a test for the wider withdrawal which is required by the road map.
The releases were part of measures announced last week after talks between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who will meet with US President George W. Bush in Aqaba, Jordan, today to endorse and launch the road map.
All the prisoners released yesterday were administrative detainees, held without trial or charge and sometimes without even being questioned or told why they are being held, for extendable periods of six months. To allow Palestinian premier and his security strongman, Minister of State for Security Affairs Mohammad Dahlan, to make serious progress in rebuilding a viable security apparatus to combat militant groups, Israel would probably have to release more prisoners, including some who have been sentenced.
Also released yesterday was the oldest-serving Palestinian prisoner, Ahmad Jbarra Abu Sukkar, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1976 for killing 14 people when he detonated an explosives-laden refrigerator in downtown Jerusalem the previous year. He had been detained in the southern coastal town of Ashkelon and was welcomed at the Qalandya checkpoint by a small crowd which had defied the curfew.
Before heading back to his village of Turmusayya, between Ramallah and Nablus, he met with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. “Without liberating all 10,000 prisoners there cannot be peace. I feel my freedom is incomplete because I left 10,000 people behind me in prison,” he told AFP.
Meanwhile, Palestinians largely boycotted the Israeli mayoral election in Jerusalem yesterday that has shaped up as a battle between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews for municipal control of the holy city. “Jerusalem is occupied so the elections are illegal,” said a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem who gave her name only as Reem. Israel annexed East Jerusalem after it occupied it in the 1967 Middle East War, a move that has not been internationally recognized.
Earlier in the day, Israeli troops dynamited the house of a jailed Palestinian activist in the West Bank, while seven young stone-throwers were wounded in clashes with the army in the city of Nablus, Palestinian security sources said. Israeli soldiers raided Nablus’ refugee camp of Balata in the morning, sparking clashes with stone-throwing youths, seven of whom were shot and wounded, the sources said.
The army slapped a curfew on the camp and searched houses, the sources said. They appeared to be looking for the local leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Arafat’s Fatah, the sources said, adding that the door of the wanted militant’s house was blown in. In the village of Deir Al-Ghassam near the northern West Bank city of Tulkarm, Israeli troops dynamited the house of Islamic Jihad member Zahar Ghanem, who was jailed more than a year ago over a car bomb attack in Israel, the army said in statement.
The Israeli army has demolished around 200 houses belonging to militants and their relatives since last summer as part of a policy aimed at deterring future attackers but condemned by rights groups as collective punishment. Some voices in Israel have questioned the deterrent value of the policy, arguing Palestinian radicals have no shortage of new recruits for suicide bombings.
