Israel backs Palestinian security force
Filed Under Curt Hennig | Posted on March 29, 2008
ISRAEL will allow up to 600 members of a Palestinian security
force trained in Jordan under a United States program to be
deployed in a West Bank city once considered a hotbed of militant
activity.
Israel hopes the Defence Ministry decision, announced before a
weekend visit by the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, will
help blunt Western and Palestinian complaints that it was not doing
enough to bolster US-backed peace talks and a Palestinian “law and
order” campaign in the occupied West Bank.
Israel’s Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, was to tell the
Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, of the decision when they
met overnight Sydney time. A defence official said the Palestinians
would decide how many troops to deploy in Jenin.
Mr Fayyad said he would “wait and see” what came out of his
meeting with Mr Barak, adding the Palestinians had forces in Jenin
and other West Bank cities. “The Palestinian Authority is capable
of achieving security,” he said.
The Palestinian Interior Minister, Abdel-Razak al-Yahya, told
Reuters: “We will deploy those forces that are training in Jordan
%26#8230; based upon Palestinian decisions.”
Palestinian forces began patrolling West Bank and Gaza towns
under the 1993 Oslo peace deal but Israeli troops re-took security
of the cities after the violent uprising in 2000.
In November, Palestinian forces were deployed in the larger West
Bank city of Nablus as part of Mr Fayyad’s law-and-order
campaign.
Mr Fayyad and some US officials have accused Israel of
undermining Palestinian Authority security efforts in Nablus by
refusing to curtain army raids into the city.
In the latest incident, Israeli troops clashed with
stone-throwing Palestinians in a Nablus refugee camp on
Tuesday.
%26#9632; A gay Palestinian man has been reunited with his Israeli
partner in Tel Aviv after Israel granted him a rare residency
permit. The 33-year-old from Jenin argued he faced death threats
from fellow Palestinians because he was gay, a Defence Ministry
official said on Tuesday.
Reuters
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