RAMALLAH/JERUSALEM — A top-level commission yesterday leveled stinging criticism against Palestinian security forces and called for officers to face trial over the debacle in which Hamas seized the Gaza Strip. “All those who failed will be punished and those who demonstrated courage will be honored,” said President Mahmoud Abbas, receiving the report he commissioned after last month’s fighting severed the Palestinians in two.
Although the 200-page report was not made public, committee member Nabil Amr spelt out unprecedented criticism, saying the findings called for a “large number” of officers to face military or civilian courts for their role. Amr said the report lambasted “senior political officials for failing in their duty,” declining to name names. “They occupied positions they were not worthy of,” he told a news conference in Ramallah.
The officials concerned, members of Abbas’ pragmatic Fatah party that lost a general election to Hamas in January 2006, will be handed over to party leaders “so that the appropriate steps can be taken against them,” said Amr. “Owing to this setup we could not count on these security forces in the case of clashes” with Hamas, said the committee member and close Abbas aide.
The commission bemoaned “a lack of leadership on the ground” during the deadly fighting in Gaza, said Amr. More than 100 Palestinians were killed in the week of fighting that saw Gaza fall to Hamas on June 15. Scores had also died in repeated outbreaks of fighting between Fatah and Hamas in previous months. Amr painted a bleak picture of security service premises and slammed haphazard recruitment for allowing rivals in the Islamist movement to infiltrate the ranks of the sprawling services loyal to Fatah and Abbas.
Meanwhile, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon yesterday publicly supported the idea of an Israeli withdrawal from most of the occupied West Bank as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. He told public radio in an interview that it was in Israel’s interest to “leave the majority of the territory of Judea and Samaria while maintaining the large settlement blocs.”
