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NABLUS, Nov 14: Around 3,000 angry Palestinians attacked a police station in the West Bank town of Jenin Wednesday in protest at the arrest of a leader of the military branch of Islamic Jihad, witnesses told AFP.
The arrest and protest came just after Israel’s Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Israeli troops could withdraw from Jenin and Tulkarem if Palestinian security forces cracked down on “gangs of terrorists” in the towns.
Protestors fired guns and stones at the station, while three grenades hit the building, the witnesses said.
It was not immediately clear if Mahmud Tawalbeh, the arrested leader of the Jenin branch of the Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Brigades, was in the building, which locals carrying flags from the spectrum of Palestinian parties were trying to enter.
Police inside the building and the angry demonstrators exchanged gunfire, which shattered windows. Unarmed demonstrators pelted the police station with stones.
Palestinian police arrested 20-year-old Tawalbeh in the West Bank town earlier in the day.
Demonstrators collected at Jenin refugee camp and marched through the city until reaching the police station.
Earlier, Peres told the US television channel CNN that Israeli tanks and troops could leave Tulkarem and Jenin within “a day or two” if Palestinian security officers enforce the peace there.
“We are as anxious to leave those places as the Palestinians are, but unfortunately there are gangs of terrorists in each of those cities. If the Palestinians put their hands on them, we shall be able to leave the places,” he said.
Israeli forces entered or surrounded six Palestinian self-rule towns in the West Bank after gunmen from a secular radical group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, assassinated tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi on October 17.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has come under heavy international pressure to crack down on hardliners as a condition for a ceasefire agreement with Israel.
The Palestinian minister for international cooperation, Nabil Shaath, has said repeated Israeli strikes on Palestinian police stations in retaliation for attacks by militant groups on Israelis have hit the security infrastructure hard.
NEW COMMITMENT HAILED: Meanwhile, in Al Quds, Israel and the Palestinians hailed on Wednesday a new commitment by US President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin to ending 13 months of violence and reviving Middle East peace talks.
But in a sign of the gulf dividing them, Israeli and Palestinian officials traded new charges over who is to blame for the failure to halt the bloodshed in which almost 900 people have been killed since September last year.
In fresh violence, Israeli police said a small bomb exploded in a garbage bin in Jerusalem on Wednesday and two municipal street cleaners were slightly hurt. The army said a soldier was slightly wounded in a mortar bomb attack in Gaza.
Bush and Putin said in a joint statement after summit talks in Washington on Tuesday that “acting in concert with other key parties” they were stepping up efforts to bring peace to the Middle East.
They urged Israel and the Palestinian Authority “to take urgent steps to ease tension, as well as refrain from actions that are harmful to the other side and to resume the dialogue at a high political level”.
They also called on the two sides to implement a truce outlined by Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet and a truce-to-talks plan drawn up by a committee led by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell.
DEMAND ISRAELI WITHDRAWAL: “We welcome the American and the Russian concern to end this conflict, the main root of which is the Israeli occupation of our lands,” said Ahmed Abdel-Rahman, an aide to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
He said “security and stability” would be achieved only when Israel withdraws from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, lands which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
Under interim peace accords signed by Israel and the Palestinians since 1993, the fate of these areas is subject to negotiations for a final peace treaty.
Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said: “Our prime minister has stated very clearly that when there is a ceasefire as required by Tenet and Mitchell, he himself will lead the negotiations.”
POWELL SPEECH: Israel and the Palestinians are awaiting a Middle East policy speech which they expect U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to give next week.
“The United States will not force a solution. I think Powell’s speech will be more principles than plans,” Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told Israel Radio, three days after meeting Powell on Sunday.—AFP/Reuters
