OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 2 May — Six Palestinian men wanted by Israel were yesterday handed over to US and British officials and Israeli forces started withdrawing from the compounds of Yasser Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters late at night. The tanks and troops were pulling back from around Arafat’s headquarters under a deal struck earlier in the day to allow the Palestinian leader to travel freely.
Israel desperately wanted to improve its image abroad after blocking a United Nations fact-finding team to the Jenin refugee camp to probe massacre charges.
Four of the men handed over were convicted by an ad hoc Palestinian military court of involvement in killing an Israeli Cabinet minister. All six had been held in the compound throughout Israel’s siege, intended to isolate Arafat.
After the Israeli pullback from Ramallah, "Arafat is free to go wherever he wants — within the (West Bank and Gaza) or even abroad," one Israeli source said.
The deal to end the Ramallah siege followed an initiative by US President George W. Bush. But Israel stood firm in its decision to defy the United Nations by blocking the UN fact-finding mission.
Israeli officials made clear they were prepared to weather the storm if UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan disbanded the Jenin mission after Israel imposed conditions on its activities in the camp.
Government spokesman Mark Sofer said Israel was unfazed by the introduction of a Security Council resolution by Arab members, led by Syria and Tunisia, demanding it cooperate with the inquiry or else face undefined measures. "I think this is part and parcel of the hypocrisy, the singling-out, we face in some of these international bodies," Sofer said.
The United States has opposed the resolution, drafted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter which allows for sanctions. Sofer said he hoped Washington would exercise its veto if it came to a vote.
Peter Hansen, director general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said the United Nations couldn’t do anything if a country like Israel rejects its resolutions. "The United Nations is not a sovereign and influential state that can make all countries honor the law...When a country like Israel rejects UN resolutions, we cannot do anything," he told a news conference in Riyadh.
He refused to comment on a question related to the UN’s double standard in dealing with Iraq and Israel. He said the condition in Jenin refugee camp was indescribable.
"The photographs appearing in the media have failed to give the true picture of the carnage," he said in reference to Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in the camps.
In new violence, four Palestinians, including an 11-month-old girl, were killed by Israeli troops during clashes in the Gaza Strip. The baby girl Huda Abu Shallouf was killed early when an Israeli tank shell slammed into her family’s home in Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. The incident later triggered gunfights between Palestinian fighters and Israeli troops who raided the camp.
Huda was asleep when the house was hit by a shell from an Israeli tank, her mother Mesa’eda said. She was speaking from her bed in a hospital where she was being treated for shrapnel wounds to her legs.
Palestinian hospital officials said that Bilal Al-Derbi, 22, and Ahmed Abu Khepleh, 21, also died after being struck in the head by machine-gun fire while at home before dawn. Elsewhere in the flashpoint border town, Abdullah Shaluff, 23, was shot dead in the head by Israeli fire outside his house, the doctor said.
The army also staged a brief incursion into the northern Palestinian town of Qalqilya, which it had seized for more than a week as part of its month-long West Bank blitz. No injuries or arrests were reported in the latest strike. Meanwhile in the divided city of Hebron, Israeli troops completed their withdrawal from Palestinian areas two days after storming the city in reprisal for a weekend attack on a nearby Jewish settlement that left four Israelis dead.
Israeli officials said 18 Palestinians were arrested and 20 others cornered in the Alia hospital in central Hebron. But the army withdrew because it "didn’t want another Church of the Nativity situation," a spokesman said, referring to the four-week-old siege in Bethlehem.
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators scheduled a new round of talks aimed at ending the month-long Bethlehem siege, the mayor of Bethlehem said.
The Palestinians had previously vowed to boycott the talks until Israeli snipers held fire and the army allowed in deliveries of food. Mayor Hanna Nasser said the Palestinian negotiators maintained their demands "but are not making them a condition for resuming the negotiations."
French Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, one of Pope John Paul II’s closest aides, was flying to Jerusalem to participate in efforts to end the siege.
