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Palestinians Crack Down on Traitors
NABLUS, West Bank, Aug 3 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - In the wake of Israel's deadly attack on Nablus Tuesday, in which eight Palestinians were killed, the Palestinian Authority has stepped up its crackdown on Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel, sentencing four to death earlier this week and arresting 60 suspects Friday.
In addition, unknown gunmen have shot down four others suspected of aiding Israel in the arrest and assassination of Palestinian activists. One was killed Tuesday night in his Bethlehem home and two more died Wednesday night in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
NPR reported that an activist group loosely associated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement claimed responsibility for the killings.
The bullet-riddled body of the fourth suspected informant was found in Bethlehem Friday, security sources said.
The three men sentenced Tuesday night by the Palestinian state court in Nablus to die by firing squad are Samer Aby Zaneh, 21, Amjad Hafayzha, 28, and Hussein Abu Aliyoun, 32, according to a BBC online report.
Two other Palestinians suspected of aiding the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) in the assassination of Fatah leader Thabet Thabet in December 2000 were spared the harsh sentence. Mohammed Abed Rahman, 17, was sentenced to 15 years in jail, while Hatam Mari was found mentally unsound and released.
The fourth man sentenced Thursday, 52-year-old Ahmed Abu Eisha, confessed to being an Israeli informer since 1982 and providing information that led to the extra-judicial killing of Hamas activist Salah Darwazeh by Israeli tank fire on July 25th, Palestinian sources said.
The firing-squad executions for those sentenced will only be carried out after approval from Arafat. The executions will be the first since two Palestinians were shot separately on January 13th in Nablus and Gaza City, the first executions for collaboration with Israel since the Palestinian Authority was formed in 1994.
A senior Palestinian security official told the French news agency AFP (Agence France-Presse) Friday that the arrests of the 60 alleged collaborators by Palestinian security forces was triggered by the deaths of eight Palestinians in Tuesday's attack.
The round up swept through the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank late Thursday and on Friday.
Collaborators were blamed for helping Israel in the helicopter attack on a Hamas office in the Nablus-based Palestinian Center for Information Tuesday. Four Hamas activists (two leaders and two members), two children aged six and nine and two journalists, one of whom was an IslamOnline contributor, were killed in the attack.
At their funeral in Nablus Wednesday, speakers and the crowd chanted revenge against Israel and against any of their brethren caught aiding the Jewish state, threatening to kill them.
But some within the Palestinian press have called for a downscaling of the violence, urging Palestinians to use stones instead of bullets or bombs. The Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that the Palestinian news agency Wafa ran an editorial Thursday titled, "The Stone and the Shoe," saying that revenge attacks promised by groups like Hamas would damage the Palestinian cause and cast it in a bad light in international opinion.
Ha'aretz added that Wafa usually echoes the thoughts of the Palestinian Authority's top leaders, and emphasized that the editorial reflects the Authority's rejection of calls for bloody vengeance.
"Only by political means we shall be able to achieve our goals, by the use of rocks to fight the Israelis, on the roadblocks and in the settlements, not inside Israel, and not using firearms," Ha'aretz quoted the editorial as saying.
Meanwhile, in a rare show of dissonance in Washington, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney expressed support for Israel's controversial targeted assassinations, going against statements of State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, who said, "We're against this practice of targeted killings and we're against this particular attack."
"If you've got an organization that has plotted or is plotting some kind of suicide bomber attack, for example, and they have hard evidence of who it is and where they're located, I think there's some justification in their trying to protect themselves by pre-empting," Cheney told Fox News television.
Nabil Abu Rudeina, a senior adviser to Arafat, told AFP that Cheney seemed to be encouraging Israel to kill.
Many who denounce the policy of extra-judicial killings say that Israel should arrest and try those it suspects of "terror" attacks, rather than carry out illegal assassinations such as Tuesday's attack, in which innocent civilians were also killed.
In other news, one of six Israeli soldiers arrested Wednesday for committing cruel and sadistic acts against Palestinian civilians last month was released Friday; the other five remain in custody before their trial, a military source said.
Also on Friday, the Jerusalem municipal council ordered the homes of seven Palestinian families to be demolished, saying they had been built illegally, officials at the mayor's office said.
And a 23-year-old Palestinian woman was arrested Friday by Israeli police after they found a bomb in a bag she was carrying at a Tel Aviv bus station.
Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa mosue in Jerusalem were restricted to male Muslim Israeli citizens aged 40 and older, in an attempt to prevent any flare-up of tensions surrounding weekly prayers at one of Islam's holiest shrines, Israeli police said.
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