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Palestine police take charge
28/08/2002 12:43 - (SA)
Gaza City - Palestinian police assumed control of three checkpoints in the Gaza Strip in the first phase of a plan under which Israeli troops are to withdraw from the area, despite an early-morning Israeli incursion there to crack down on arms smuggling.
The largely symbolic move came as Israeli Defence Minister
Binyamin Ben Eliezer cancelled a meeting with Palestinian interior minister Abdel Razaq al-Yahya after an overnight mortar attack on a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli defence ministry said.
The Palestinian security forces returned to three positions they
held before Israeli forces destroyed them during 23 months of
low-level fighting. The move was part of a confidence-building
scheme to restore some measure of trust between the two sides.
"Today we are starting measures on the ground, putting police in
checkpoints they manned before the intifada," a police official
said.
Police were back at two checkpoints in the area of Khan Yunis in
the south and one near Beit Lahia, just north of Gaza City,
witnesses said.
Under the plan, Israeli forces will pull back from positions in
Palestinian self-rule zones they have re-occupied since the start of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, as Palestinian security forces ensure militants do not attack Israeli targets such as settlements or military posts.
Israeli forces left Bethlehem on August 19.
Overnight, meanwhile, Israeli tanks, backed by helicopters and
naval boats, made an incursion into an autonomous Palestinian area south of Gaza City, Palestinian security sources said.
Gunfire and explosions could be heard from the Sheikh Ajli area
south of Gaza City on the Mediterranean coast.
The operation was carried out to foil an arms-smuggling
operation into Gaza, Israeli military sources said early on Wednesday.
Warships fired at barrels floating in the sea - often used to
mark sunken arms caches - Israeli public radio reported, saying
one of the barrels exploded. After a pause, the sea search was
resumed at day break.
There had been no earlier reports of trouble in the area.
But in the southern Gaza Strip, a Jewish home in the Gush Katif
settlement bloc was hit by a Palestinian mortar, damaging the roof but causing no casualties, the Israeli military said.
The incident was serious enough to warrant postponing the
scheduled security meenting between Ben Eliezer and Yahya, the
Israeli defence ministry said.
"Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer decided to postpone the
security meeting planned for this evening with the Palestinians," a statement said.
"This decision was due to the serious incident in which a mortar
round was fired at the kindergarten (in a Jewish settlement) of an apartment block in Gush Katif" in the southern Gaza Strip, it said.
The meeting had been meant to capitalise on a prolonged period
of relative calm to expand the security co-operation plan, which is opposed by Palestinian hardline factions who have vowed to step up attacks and scuttle the initiative.
The Israeli minister has insisted his project is still "alive"
despite an army refusal to quit Palestinian areas of Hebron, a West Bank city expected to be the next in line for a withdrawal.
Gaza was originally chosen to be the litmus test for renewed
security co-operation because its security infrastructure has been spared the destruction wrought by months of Israeli re-occupation of the West Bank.
It is, however, also the stronghold of powerful Islamist
militant groups implacably opposed to the security plan. They say
it is aimed at undermining their armed struggle against Israeli
occupation, which has cost more than 2 400 lives.
Israel has insisted that it will keep up it search operations in
the West Bank for suspected militants despite the embryonic
security pact.
In the West Bank on Tuesday, Israeli forces nabbed two political
leaders from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PFLP), a day after capturing a senior political chief from the
radical Islamic group Hamas. - Sapa-AFP
- SAPA
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