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Israel-Palestine

Gaza brownshirts detain Paleo envoy

2005-06-04

Armed men have blocked Gaza's road leading to the Egyptian border and detained a Palestinian diplomat who attempted to cross. About 35 members of a group known as the Fatah Hawks detained Shaker Abu Eida, the Palestinian Authority's ambassador to North Korea. Oh no! The Kim Jong Il study group will be left without a Dear Leader! Abu Eida told journalists on Saturday that he had not been harmed and that he would be allowed to return to Gaza City if he wished. However, one of the masked men said the envoy's diplomatic passport had been confiscated. "Nobody from the Palestinian Authority will travel to Egypt today." "Ain't nobody doin' nuttin', 'less we okays it!" The group said it had caused traffic disruption to highlight what it claims is an unfair police recruitment policy. Speaking to Aljazeera, the unnamed spokesman said the group had been excluded from a recent Palestinian Authority drive to recruit 5000 police officers because they were older than the maximum stipulated age of 23. They insisted that former Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza should have been merged into the security services. A Palestinian Interior Ministry official was in contact with the gunmen and trying to resolve the situation. Palestinian security forces in the Rafah area did not immediately intervene.

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Israel-Palestine

Four Israeli Soldiers Killed, Nine Wounded, in Tunnel Bombing

2004-12-12

Four Israeli soldiers were killed and nine others wounded when Palestinian gunmen set off explosives in a tunnel they burrowed underneath an army post just outside the Gaza Strip border crossing to Egypt, Israeli officials said. ``This was a large-scale attack on an outpost just outside an international crossing that Palestinian civilians use to get into Egypt,'' Capt. Jacob Dallal said. ``It was a very large blast. It leveled the outpost and caused damage in the adjacent army base.'' Dallal said soldiers were wounded in the attack against the small outpost where Palestinian passports were checked before travelers entered the Rafah terminal. Israeli officials said four were killed. First boom like this since Yasser kicked it. I guess there's too much love in the air for Hamas to stomache... The attack came as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon began negotiating with opposition parties to form a new coalition that will allow him to move ahead with a plan to withdraw from Gaza and four Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Sharon threw out his junior coalition partner after they refused to vote for the 2005 budget. The violence also came as Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader who is serving time in an Israeli jail for his role in the killing of five people, said he will withdraw from the Jan. 9 election for president of the Palestinian Authority, his campaign manager Ahmed Ghneim said at a press conference. Barghouti said in a statement he will back Mahmoud Abbas, a former prime minister who is the official candidate of Fatah, the biggest Palestinian faction. The Palestinian Islamic militant group Hamas said it was responsible for the attack, as did a group known as the Fatah Hawks, the daily Haaretz said on its Web site. Entirely too much peace, love, and goodwill in the air for Hamas and the "Fatah Hawks," which is probably the Yasser Martyrs Brigades with a false nose and moustache. Getting a good offensive under way, like the hard boyz in Iraq are trying to do, can lead to no elections. Hamas won't thrive nearly as well under any form of government other than anarchy.

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Israel-Palestine

Land-locked Palestinian naval police faces new work drought

2004-09-13

From the Dept. of WTF???? THE land-locked West Bank may seem an unlikely place to situate a naval base, but for Palestinians without land for a state perhaps it is fitting to have a navy without a sea. Only the small anchors painted in black on the stucco barracks of the Palestinian Naval Police in Jericho recall the sea. Nearby are parched Judean desert hills, including the biblical Mount of Temptation, and the oldest city in the world, sleepy Jericho, itself surrounded on all sides by the Israeli army. Inside the cramped base, things are hardly on a war footing. An unarmed young naval policeman, wearing khaki camouflage fatigues, greets his visitor and starts preparing the obligatory watery black coffee. In base commander Lieutenant-Colonel Hatim Hassan's office, overseen by a framed poster of a smiling Yasser Arafat, the television is tuned to an Arabic music station. "Our relation with the sea is very weak because the Israelis control the sea and we don't have the capacity to go into the business of the sea," Lt-Col Hassan admits. Back in the days of the PLO, the naval police, founded in 1968 in Latakia, Syria, specialised in training for seaborne attacks on Israeli civilian targets. Its last such operation was in 1985, when frogmen on their way to carry out an attack were intercepted by the Israeli navy. More recently, the naval police came to prominence when its officers were implicated in 2002 in the attempted smuggling to Gaza of a large stash of weapons aboard a ship, the Karine A, that was seized in the Red Sea by the Israeli navy. What was once envisaged as the navy for an independent state is now a special forces police unit that acts according to Yasser Arafat's whim. "The doctrine of the naval police is to show all loyalty to the decisions of the president," says Lt-Col Hassan, 43, whose dream was to captain a commercial ship. Its policing role and loyalty to Mr Arafat explains why the navy has bases in Jericho, Nablus, Bethlehem and Hebron in the West Bank, set up by presidential order in 1995. There are 1,500 men in the naval police, making it one of the smaller forces among the often competing 11 security branches at Mr Arafat's disposal. Mr Arafat, under pressure from calls for reform, issued a presidential decree in July that the security forces would be merged into three bodies, a move that would terminate the naval police as an independent force. But analysts say he is loathe to give up his ability to divide and rule security forces. "To give up that card means he is left completely naked," says Mahdi Abdul Hadi, director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs. In Gaza, after the 1993 Oslo Agreement, the naval police had a few ships ostensibly to patrol against smuggling in the shadow of the Israeli navy, but their main job was to fight challenges to Mr Arafat's rule. "We acted against the Fatah Hawks, we had to have an iron fist, we had clashes against Hamas as well," says Lt-Col Hassan. "The goal is always to restore order in the worst conditions. When it is the worst conditions, we move in," he adds. Lieutenant Akram Farid, 24, pipes up: "With one section of 30 to 50 men we can restore order anywhere." This has hardly been tested recently. With chaos prevailing across the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank in the form of inter-Palestinian assassinations, attacks on security posts and the rule in some areas of the al-Aksa brigades, there have been increasing Palestinian calls on Mr Arafat to "restore order". But the naval police are waiting for an order that is not coming. Meanwhile, the idea of a Palestinian navy has been shelved. "Our ambition is to live in peace and security, not to have a navy. We have forgotten about that," says Lt-Col Hassan.

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