RAMALLAH/GAZA CITY, 19 August 2007 — Israel has granted amnesty to 110 “wanted” Palestinian fighters affiliated with President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement.
“We received the list of names last night,” said Akram Al-Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Preventive Security (PPS) forces in Nablus, adding that the list included 31 activists from Nablus.
The amnesty was part of a series of concessions promised by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to bolster Abbas whose Fatah movement lost control of the Gaza Strip after days of fighting with Hamas militias in mid-June.
“From today, the security services will start the procedure to inform the wanted, and to let them know of the amnesty requirements,” Rajoub said.
The amnesty will apply to only those militants in the West Bank who hand in their weapons to the Palestinian Authority and pledge to stop attacks against the Jewish state.
According to Rajoub, the Fatah gunmen would be asked to remain one week in one of the bases belonging to the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, and then stay an additional three months within the confines of the Palestinian territories designated “A territories” under the Oslo accords. The “A territories” used to be under full security control of the Palestinian Authority until their status was ended by Israel when it reoccupied West Bank cities in its large-scale military “Operation Defensive Shield” in April 2002 after a series of Palestinian bombing attacks on Israel.
If they do not participate in any military-related activities during this period, the activists would be able to travel throughout the West Bank without fearing arrest, as well as travel abroad, the Palestinian official said.
Israel pardoned 216 West Bank Fatah gunmen last July after sending their names in two lists to the Palestinian authorities. Rajoub said: “The new list does not contain big names of wanted gunmen whom Israel is still hunting. We will work, according to the agreements made with the Israeli side. The case of the wanted will remain open, until all the problems of the wanted Palestinians are solved.”
Nasser Al-Kharraz, the spokesman of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and the one whose name figures on the most recent list, said: “We reject the classification that Israel makes in this context; we want the lists to contain all the wanted from all the factions, without any exception.”
Aside from Kharraz, some well-known names from the Nablus area on the list are Ala’ Al-Akleek, Majdi Al-Nabulsi, Medhat Al-Shakhsheer and Sameer Al-Shakhsheer.
Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers shot dead one Palestinian and wounded two yesterday on the border with the Gaza Strip. A Palestinian source named the victim as Mohammed Abid, a 17-year-old from El-Bureij refugee camp, and said he was not involved in armed activity.
Palestinian rescue services who retrieved Abid’s body from the Israelis said the shooting happened east of Gaza City. The latest fatality took to 5,820 the number of people killed in Israeli-Palestinian violence since 2000, the vast majority of them Palestinian.
