RAMALLAH, May 1: The Palestinian Authority on Wednesday began the transfer of six prisoners wanted by Israel to US and British authorities who will oversee their detention in a Palestinian jail.
The handover, once completed, will open the way for Israel to lift the siege of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
The men have been kept in Arafat’s offices since the start of the siege when troops and tanks broke into the compound at the start of a West Bank offensive in March.
Witnesses in the compound said at least three of the men, one of them in a wheelchair due to a leg injury and another in handcuffs, were taken out of the offices and placed in the custody of British and US officials in a convoy of waiting armoured vehicles.
“Within 10 minutes four prisoners and two detainees will be transferred to Jericho with the British and American guardians and the convoy will leave Ramallah within a few minutes,” Palestinian official Nabil Abu Rudainah said.
The six Palestinians are to be taken to a jail in Jericho, where the foreign officials will monitor their detention under a US-brokered agreement. Israel originally sought their extradition for trial.
Four of the prisoners were convicted by a Palestinian military court of involvement in the killing of an Israeli minister.
A fifth is the leader of a Palestinian group which took responsibility for the assassination. The sixth prisoner is a senior Palestinian finance official who is accused by Israel of arranging an attempt to smuggle arms from Iran.
BABY KILLED: An 11-month-old Palestinian girl was killed on Wednesday when an Israeli tank shell slammed into her family’s home in Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
The incident later triggered gunfights between Palestinians and Israeli troops who raided the camp. Baby Huda Abu Shallouf was asleep when the house was hit by a shell from an Israeli tank, her mother Mesa’eda said. She was speaking from her bed in a hospital where she was being treated for shrapnel wounds to her legs. “One of the shells hit near where Huda slept and part of the wall fell on her,” the weeping mother said.
The girl suffered fatal shrapnel wounds to her head and died at the Rafah hospital after her grandfather carried her in his arms for at least two kilometres to an ambulance.
Another person in the house was also killed, a Palestinian security official said. The house was wrecked.
The Israeli army said a tank had fired a shell at three guerillas who had set off a roadside bomb. If a child was killed it was the guerillas’ fault, an Israeli army spokesman said.—Reuters