Palestinians Captured in Israeli Raid On Prison

Photos
Israeli Forces Seize Palestinian Jail
Amid gunfire, street clashes and billowing black smoke from explosives, Israeli forces laid siege Tuesday to a Palestinian jail in the West Bank town of Jericho demanding custody of six prisoners there alleged to have participated in the assassination of Israel's tourism minister in 2001.

Israeli forces used bulldozers, tank fire and explosives to dismantle the military complex housing nearly 300 members of the Palestinian security forces and prisoners, who surrendered in groups throughout the day.

Saadat, who was elected to the Palestinian parliament in January, pledged in interviews conducted by cell phone that he would not surrender. Leaders of Hamas, the radical Islamic group at war with Israel, urged him to hold out.

Saadat's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is a Marxist group on the U.S. government's list of foreign terrorist organizations. Saadat and four other PFLP members allegedly involved in Zeevi's killing -- itself a response to Israel's assassination of PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustafa -- were transferred to the jail here from then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Ramallah compound in May 2002 on the condition they be kept under U.S. and British observation.

The sixth man Israeli forces sought was Fuad Shobaki, a member of Abbas's Fatah party implicated by Israel in arms smuggling. He was brought to the jail here under the same agreement, which ended a 34-day siege of Ramallah by the Israeli military.

Israeli officials said the British informed them Friday that they would be withdrawing the 15-member monitoring team but did not provide a date. U.S. officials said the Israelis and the Palestinians were notified as the three British guards on duty at the time departed.

"The withdrawal decision was made on the ground and not in coordination with the Israelis," said Stuart Tuttle, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv.

Israel turned over this usually tranquil city, set against sheer hillsides amid the palms and orange groves of the Jordan Valley, to Palestinian security forces a year ago. Although Israeli troops maintain a presence on the city's perimeter, Tuesday's operation was the first time Israeli armor had entered the city in such force since the earliest days of the most recent Palestinian uprising, which started in September 2000.

Throughout the day, young Palestinians surged along streets largely empty of traffic, hurling stones at Israeli troops who sealed off several blocks around the military compound.

Along a narrow residential street leading to the compound, teenagers from the nearby Hisham Bin Abdel Malik School threw rocks at Israeli army jeeps a block away, then scattered through groves of fruit trees amid Israeli gunfire.

A university student iced a red welt on his upper thigh, inflicted by a rubber bullet. A young boy, shot through the pelvis, fell amid a back yard full of lemon trees. A group of men rushed him to a clinic blocks away, where he waited for transportation to the city hospital. He underwent surgery there hours later.

Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh, commander of Israel's Central Command, said his troops had taken 280 prisoners from the compound by the end of the operation. Israeli officials said the standoff ended when Palestinian police, who had stood by Saadat throughout the day, surrendered soon after dusk.

Naveh said most of the prisoners would be released to the custody of the Palestinian Authority in coming days. But he said his troops had found 15 additional Palestinians wanted by Israeli forces who would remain in Israeli hands.

"We operated according to the circumstances in order to bring the murderers of Zeevi to trial," Naveh said.