AMMAN, 4 February 2005 — Palestinians trained in Jordan will be deployed in the West Bank, Jordanian Foreign Minister Hani Mulki said yesterday, denying Israeli media reports that Jordanian forces would be sent to the area.
“They are PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) forces that have been denied to go inside the territories,” Mulki told AFP.
“They are not Jordanians, they are Palestinians, and they have been trained by Jordanian special forces. They abide by the instructions of the president of the Palestinian Authority,” he said.
Israel’s Maariv newspaper reported that Jordan’s King Abdallah had offered to deploy 1,000 Jordanian troops in the northern West Bank to ensure order after Israel pulls out from four small settlements there later this year.
But Mulki insisted that the force, described by the Israeli media as the Badr Brigade, was made up of Palestinians trained in Jordan.
“They are not ours. Jordan has no jurisdiction over them. They were our guests and we trained them,” he said.
Meanwhile, a group of Palestinian police officers left yesterday to begin training in Egypt, one of Egypt’s moves to help rebuild Palestinian security institutions and prepare them to take over areas of the Gaza Strip being vacated by Israel under a pullout plan.
The 42 officers left for Egypt from the Gaza-Egypt crossing, the first of a series of groups of security forces to receive training from Cairo. It was unclear how long the training would last or how many officers would be trained in total.
Egypt has pledged to train the Palestinian police forces, which have been largely destroyed in four years of fighting with Israel. Egypt wants to ensure the forces are prepared to preserve law and order in the volatile Gaza Strip after a planned Israeli withdrawal is completed later this year.
