RAMALLAH: The Palestinian Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs yesterday strongly condemned the decision of Israeli military courts to deport Palestinian prisoners holding Arab and foreign passports from the Palestinian territories.
The ministry said that the Israeli courts issued a decision to deport two Palestinian brothers, Omar and Talib Oudeh, from Jenin to Jordan, after they served their jail term despite the fact that they are holding Palestinian IDs.
It added that the Israeli courts also decided to deport Marwan Farraj from Bethlehem to Jordan. The ministry said that Farraj “refused to sign the expulsion decision and the prison administration is exercising huge psychological pressure against him to force him to sign the court decision.”
The ministry said Ibrahim Hamdiya, was separated from his wife and children, who live in Jenin, and was deported to the Gaza on the pretext that he had resided in the West Bank illegally.
The ministry said that the decisions are a “violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention which forbids Israel as an occupying power from altering the demographic composition of territories it has seized, either by expelling Palestinians or by settling Jews there.”
The ministry called on international human rights organizations to “urgently intervene to put an end to this Israeli policy of deportation which is backed by a legal cover provided by the Israeli High Court of Justice in order to pass violations against Palestinian civilians”, warning that the “international community’s silence encourages Israel to deport more Palestinians”.
Meanwhile, a senior Hamas official said yesterday that his movement is not ruling out the possibility that some so-called “heavyweight” Palestinian prisoners will be expelled to Syria should they be released by Israel in the framework of a possible exchange deal for captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
Mahmoud Al-Zahhar told the Arabic-language daily newspaper Al-Hayat that the movement was “considering the issue of expelling the prisoners from the West Bank.” “Any such decision will be implemented with the prisoners’ consent,” he said in the interview, published Saturday.
Media sources said that Israel has accepted Hamas’ demand to free eight “heavyweight” prisoners, but insists that four of them be deported to Syria.
The sources said that Israel has prepared a new list of Palestinian prisoners it is willing to release and is ready to relay it to Hamas as quickly as possible in order to further a possible swap arrangement, after a cabinet decision on Wednesday to make Shalit’s release a precondition to any new cease-fire agreement in the Gaza Strip.
The four prisoners slated for expulsion are: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Secretary-General Ahmad Sa’adat; Ibrahim Hamed, Hamas’ military commander in the West Bank; bomb-maker Abdullah al-Barghouthi and Abbas el-Sayed of Hamas military wing.
Zahhar said Israel has issued fresh demands in the ongoing Egyptian-mediated ceasefire negotiations, including tying the truce to a prisoner exchange deal that would see Shalit returned to Israel.
“The Israelis are in the midst of a major crisis regarding the establishment of the new coalition,” he said. “In any case, we are not desperate to reach a ceasefire agreement, and the prisoner swap has its own special price tag.”
