GAZA CITY, 17 January 2006 — Palestinian Interior Minister Nasser Yousuf said yesterday that fighters in Gaza have rejected a Palestinian Authority plan to put their weapons in storage during next week’s parliamentary election as a way to reduce the risk of violence.
Fears of chaos during the Jan. 25 ballot are strong in the Gaza Strip, where lawlessness has grown since Israel’s withdrawal last September and intensified a power struggle among armed factions and security forces.
Interior Minister Yousuf said a proposal had been made for factions in Gaza to collect their own weapons just before the ballot and put them into a storage area to which they would have one key and the Palestinian Authority another. “But they rejected the proposal,” Yousuf told reporters.
Khader Habib, an Islamic Jihad leader, confirmed the proposal was rejected, but denied that the group’s weapons contributed to Gaza’s “chaos and anarchy” or threatened security during the elections.
Yousuf said the Palestinian Authority had offered police protection to faction leaders in Gaza in the hope that they would leave their armed bodyguards at home on election day. But that too was rejected. Habib said the armed factions “know better how to protect their leaders.” In a warning to fighters, Yousuf said security forces had “clear instructions to confront any attempt to use arms during the election period.” He was speaking after talks with UN special envoy for the Middle East peace process, Alvaro de Soto.
Violence in the run-up to the election has come as an embarrassment to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Many armed protests and abductions have involved gunmen from his own ruling Fatah movement, some of whom want the poll delayed.
Fatah is widely expected to lose ground in the election to Hamas, which is riding a wave of popularity among Palestinians because of its corruption-free reputation and extensive charity network. Yousuf said that efforts to safeguard polling in the West Bank would be badly hampered by Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement in the occupied territory.
“So far we have not reached any significant agreement with the Israelis over the movement by security forces to afford protection to the election process,” he said.
In another development, more than 150 Israeli police and border policemen, some on horseback, imposed order in the divided southern West Bank city of Hebron yesterday, and arrested at least 15 rioting settler youths, Israeli media reported.
A tense calm prevailed in the city by yesterday evening, as officers, some of them on horseback, patrolled the streets.
Dozens of radical settlers clashed with Israeli security forces Sunday, throwing stones and bottles with paint, on the third day of rioting which erupted Friday following an Israeli Supreme Court order to evict Jewish families from Palestinian-owned stores in the Hebron market place. Some 500 settlers live in a Jewish enclave amid 160,000 Palestinians in the divided city.
Acting Premier Ehud Olmert has ordered the security forces to act firmly to quell the settlers’ rioting.
— With input from agencies
