OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 14 August — The Israeli Supreme Court yesterday stayed an order to deport three relatives of wanted Palestinians from the West Bank pending a legal review of the controversial measure. An army tribunal had ordered the three banished to the Gaza Strip in a new crackdown on the families of suspected militants aimed at deterring Palestinian bombings and other attacks on civilians.
But after appeals filed by Kifah Adjuri, 28, his sister Intissar, 34, and Abdel Nasser Assidi, 34, the Supreme Court stayed the orders and gave the army two weeks to justify its action, court sources said. “We are happy that the court did not fall for the collective hysteria and automatically approve an act of collective punishment that strikes people whose only crime is to be relatives of suspects,” said Lea Tsemel, an attorney for the three.
The Adjuris are the brother and sister of Ali Adjuri, a local West Bank chief of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group linked to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement. Ali Adjuri, killed by Israeli soldiers on Aug. 6 near the West Bank town of Jenin, was accused of organizing a double bombing that killed five other people in Tel Aviv on July 17.
Assidi’s brother is a member of the armed wing of the Hamas resistance group wanted by Israeli security forces for a July 16 bus ambush near a West Bank settlement.
A minister from Israel’s extremist-dominated government, meanwhile, blasted the Supreme Court’s ruling. “I deeply regret that the expulsions have not been applied due to the court’s order because expulsions can dissuade terrorists from carrying out suicide operations,” said Danny Naveh, a minister without portfolio from the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Likud party.
The expulsions had been ordered late Monday by a military court in the West Bank settlement of Beit El, near Ramallah, and were appealed to the high court by The Center of the Defense of the Individual, an Israeli rights group. The center had slammed the army ruling as a “collective punishment contrary to international law and natural rights.”
“This is a pitiful decision,” said Tsemel, an attorney for the group, in reaction to the military court’s ruling. Tsemel advised the Palestinian Authority not to cooperate with the order, recalling that Israel used to expel Palestinians to Arab countries like Egypt and Lebanon and then dumped them on the Lebanese border when they were refused entry.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday plans for Palestinian security reforms were on track despite a negative report about recent talks between the Palestinian interior minister and Central Intelligence Agency chief George Tenet. Powell said in Washington he spoke to Tenet yesterday about his meeting on Saturday with Interior Minister Abdel Razzak Al-Yahya, whose place at the helm of security forces was held by Arafat until a Cabinet reshuffle in June.“They (the Palestinians) had good meetings with Mr. Tenet on Saturday and I talked to George this morning after seeing one account that suggested they did not,” he said.
In another development, a member of the Fatah movement and another accused of links with Al-Qaeda were killed and eight others wounded in a clash yesterday at a refugee camp in southern Lebanon, Palestinian sources said in Beirut. Palestinian factions were quick to issue stern warnings to a handful of Lebanese Islamists suspected of links with Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terror network and hiding at the camp to surrender or face military attack. The gunmen staged a surprise morning raid on the Fatah headquarters at the main entrance of the Ain El-Helweh camp on the outskirts of the Lebanese port city of Sidon.
