A-RAM, West Bank, 11 December 2004 — Israeli police detained a Palestinian presidential candidate after a scuffle with him at a West Bank checkpoint yesterday, the second such incident to mar the campaign to elect a successor to Yasser Arafat.
Witnesses said paramilitary border police stopped Bassam Al-Salhi, handcuffed him and took him away as he tried to cross A-Ram checkpoint into Jerusalem. Police scuffled with Salhi’s aides when they tried to pull him free.
A police spokesman said Salhi, a member of the communist People’s Party faction inside the Palestine Liberation Organization, did not have a permit to enter Jerusalem.
“He was detained for questioning but he has not been arrested,” the spokesman said.
Palestinians want Israel to ease its clampdown in the West Bank and Gaza Strip so candidates can move freely ahead of Jan. 9 presidential elections.
Wary of Palestinian militants waging a four-year-old revolt, Israel said it would try to cooperate.
Salhi is the second of nine presidential contenders to have been detained by Israeli security forces since the start of the campaign. Both are considered long shots.
On Wednesday, independent candidate Mustafa Barghouti said troops beat and briefly detained him at an army checkpoint outside the West Bank city of Jenin. The army said Barghouti and his entourage had refused to submit to a routine car search.
East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed as its capital in a move not recognized internationally, is an especially emotive issue in the run-up to the first Palestinian poll to be held since 1996.
Palestinians, who also want the city as the capital of their future state, had demanded that Israel allow its Arab residents to vote for the Palestinian president. Israel says it will only allow East Jerusalemites to vote by absentee ballot.
Palestinians are also divided by the campaign, after Islamic groups led by Hamas failed to persuade the dominant faction Fatah to hold general elections in which they could vie for parliamentary control of the Palestinian Authority.
Hamas has settled for enlisting grass roots support in local elections. But in a sign of possible Israeli interference, five of the group’s municipal candidates were arrested in a military raid in the West Bank city of Hebron on Thursday.
“It is an Israeli signal, telling us: Muslims go away,” said Abbas Al-Aweisa, father of one of the detainees and himself a member of Hamas, which is sworn to Israel’s destruction. An Israeli Army spokeswoman said the five Hebron detainees were “wanted for terrorist activities”.
Hamas is the main group behind a campaign of suicide bombings against Israelis during the four-year-old Palestinian uprising.
