May 13, 2002	Monday	Safar 29, 1423

LONDON: Shortly after 11am on Friday, an armoured bus rolled into Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. It was the kind used by Jewish settlers on the West Bank.

But its occupants were not settlers; they were 13 Palestinian fighters who had surrendered the previous night after five weeks holed up in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.

The 13 included nine members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, some of them members of Bethlehem’s feared Abbayat clan, blamed by the Israelis for a series of terrorist attacks over the last 20 months.

Included too were three members of Hamas. The thirteenth was Abdullah Daoud, the Palestinian intelligence chief in Bethlehem.

Waiting for the gunmen on the runway at Ben Gurion was Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain’s Ambassador to Israel, plus 30 members of the Royal Military Police and an RAF woman doctor.

Four hours earlier, the first of these gunmen had walked carefully from the Gate of Humility, the main door of the fourth-century basilica, under the sights of Israeli snipers. They had emerged from the squalor and chaos of the church and into the hazy sunlight of Manger Square. Some had waved or flashed victory signs. One dropped to the ground, kneeling in Muslim prayer.

Now they were on their way to exile, guarded for their bus journey by heavily armed representatives of Israel’s security organisations: Shin Bet, military police, border police and airport police. Riding in their own armoured vehicles outside the bus were officials of the CIA. It was Cowper-Coles’s job to see them off.

The Palestinians, save for one with a serious leg wound dressed with a bloody and stinking tea towel, were quickly marched across to where Cowper-Coles was waiting by an RAF transport.

As they approached, the ambassador stepped forward and addressed the men in fluent Arabic. “Welcome,” he told them, “you are now being handed into the custody of the British Army.” A few minutes later they were on their way to Cyprus and the beginning of what the Israelis intend to be a lifetime of exile.

The ending of the siege at the Church of the Nativity was the culminating moment in a dramatic diplomatic coup. In the space of just over seven days British and US negotiators had ended not only the siege of Yasser Arafat’s compound, taking into British-monitored custody six Palestinian fighters being held there, but had secured the surrender into exile of the Bethlehem Thirteen.

It was a process that began, however, not amid the violence of Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield, but in an exchange between the UK prime minister, Tony Blair, and Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, at Sharon’s official residence in Al Quds. That was on Nov 1 last year and - recalls a diplomat who witnessed the scene - Blair and Sharon were deep in conversation as they stood next to Sharon’s grand piano. Both had much on their minds.

For Blair, in the region to shore up support in the Arab world for America’s war on terrorism launched in response to the suicide attacks of Sept 11, the bloodshed in Israel and Palestine was becoming a worrying distraction.

By the end of February a high-powered team had been assembled for the mission. It would include Sarah Boardman, the head of the Foreign Office’s so-called ‘Levant Desk’; Nick Burrows, a military-legal expert, and Andrew Coyle, the director of the prison studies centre at King’s College London and a former government adviser.

By the beginning of March, Boardman, Burrows and Coyle were in the region for a three-day visit. They visited the five detainees at Arafat’s compound and began negotiations for their transfer to the prison in Jericho, where it was envisaged they would be held under a British-monitored regime.

A week ago on Saturday, buoyed by the success of the British initiative over Ramallah, Bush decided the same teams could also negotiate an end to the siege at the church and sent messages to both Arafat and Sharon, saying that he wanted that ended too. This time, however, the fighters would be sent into exile.

Again Cowper-Coles was in the frame with Kurtzer to help with the negotiations, while a team of CIA negotiators assisted by the EU’s special envoy Alastair Crooke began talks with the gunmen inside the church. The team inside the church would be led by the CIA station chief, Jeff O’Connell.

Again the negotiations moved quickly. The catch this time was that everyone was assuming, on the basis of conversations with the Vatican, that Italy would take the fugitives.

An interim solution was found. “The Cypriots indicated they would be happy to take the Bethlehem fighters until a final destination could be found.” Bethlehem’s long siege was finally over. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.