AL QUDS: Israelis knew it as Ketziot. Palestinians called it Ansar 3. Both believed that the sprawling prison camp in the Negev desert was a painful piece of their shared past that they had left behind forever.

But in the midst of Operation Defensive Shield, Israel’s massive military sweep through the West Bank, the Israeli army announced that it had reopened Ketziot, closed six years ago as Israel and the Palestinians began implementing the 1993 Oslo peace accords.

Opened in 1988, Ketziot grew to be the single largest detention center for Palestinians arrested during their first revolt against Israel’s military rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Thousands of Palestinians were held in the camp’s tents at any one time. Many of them were academics, professionals, poets and political activists who were never charged with crimes.

Men on both sides who lived through Ketziot’s first incarnation, and who still remember the heroes’ welcomes the last prisoners released from the camp received when they were bused back to their communities in Gaza and the West Bank, have expressed dismay that once again it is housing Palestinian prisoners.

“It feels like we are on a roller coaster that is taking us back to times we all wanted to leave behind and we don’t have control over the direction we’re heading,” said Ron Krumer, who in the 1980s served in the Israeli military bureaucracy that ran civil affairs in the West Bank.

“Ansar 3 was established to break Palestinian morale and to stop the first intifada, and it was a failure,” said Nabhan Khreisheh, a Palestinian imprisoned in Ketziot for six months in 1988 on unspecified charges. “Now they want to try again to break our morale, to punish Palestinians who are politically active. “In reopening Ansar, they are saying to the Palestinians, “Look where your leadership has brought you.” But I do not think it will work this time either,” Khreisheh said.

With the collapse of the peace process and the outbreak of the latest intifada in September 2000, arrests of Palestinian fighters surged. Detention centers to house Palestinian prisoners were overcrowded even before the latest military offensive.

One week after Operation Defensive Shield began in late March, the army started transferring Palestinian prisoners from Ofer prison, in the West Bank, to Ketziot, about 30 miles southwest of the desert city of Beersheba, not far from the border with Egypt.

Prisoners began arriving at Ketziot on April 10. Human rights organizations believe that about 300 Palestinians are now being held there. Several rights groups have charged that the transfer of West Bank Palestinians to a prison inside Israel violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits holding prisoners in a country other than their own.

“We have complained to the attorney general, and if we don’t like his answer to our complaints, we will go to the High Court of Justice,” said Hannah Friedman, executive director of the Israeli Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. Friedman said prisoners complain that they do not have enough blankets and that they are sleeping on thin pads on the ground. Food, she said, is inadequate, and water is scarce.

After his release from Ketziot in 1989, Al Mutawakil Taha, a Palestinian poet recalled an incident in which an Israeli contractor who had arrived to build a fence in the camp happened to bring his children with him. “They were all small and cute,” Taha said. “All of a sudden, all the prisoners in Ward 5 came out of their tents and stood by the fence just to watch the kids.” The men, he said, saw in the faces of the Israeli children the faces of their own children, from whom they had been separated for months. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.