Humiliating surrender for Palestinian police
Israeli army in campaign to destroy security forces
Suzanne Goldenberg in Ramallah, West Bank
Tuesday April 2, 2002
The Guardian
Cornered and hopelessly outgunned, the Palestinian policemen
tore off their uniforms and stripped to their underpants, filing out
one by one in the now familiar drill of surrender to the Israeli
army.
As the Israeli army swept into three more West Bank towns, a
disturbing picture emerged yesterday of a systematic campaign
to destroy and dismantle the Palestinian police.
The capture of the 22 policemen at the Darraghmeh apartment
buildings in Ramallah offered a prototype for the Israeli army's
expanding offensive: raids on residential and commercial
buildings, hospitals, private homes and television stations and
round-ups of Palestinian men, punctuated by fierce gun battles
and, Palestinians say, summary executions.
In many instances, the raids have focused on the Palestinian
police, who are entitled to bear arms under the Oslo peace
accords, and who are Yasser Arafat's main instrument for the
ceasefire Israel and the US are demanding.
The soldiers are also making use of civilians as shields, forcing
men to march ahead of them at gunpoint as they shoot their
way into suspected hideouts of armed Palestinians.
It is unclear how the 22 Palestinian policemen made their way
into the Darraghmeh buildings, past the Israeli tanks prowling
the deserted city. But by Sunday night, some two dozen Israeli
forces burst in on them in an abandoned third-floor flat, tossing
in a grenade which pitted the walls like a rash.
The Israeli soldiers retreated to a stairwell, spraying the door of
the flat with gunfire for 20 minutes, neighbours said. They pulled
back to a neighbouring building and seized an architecture
student, Nader Mansi, 22, setting him the dangerous task of
returning to the building to coax the policemen to surrender.
"The officer said he wanted all the Palestinian soldiers to come
out of the buildings first, and to take off their boots, their
trousers, and their jackets," Mr Mansi said.
The stairwell of the building yesterday provided evidence of the
policemen's humiliating surrender, a jumble of boots, khaki
trousers, and insignia in the colours of the Palestinian flag.
They were discarded before the policemen emerged from the
building, spinning around to show they were unarmed, before
they were handcuffed, blindfolded, and bundled into an armoured
personnel carrier.
A splash of blood stained the doorway, where one man was shot
dead at the start of the raid. "The first one who came down was
stupid or inexperienced," said Randa al-Zeer, who watched the
drama from her second-floor flat. "He came downstairs with his
gun in his hands above his head. So they shot him."
The Israeli army said the dead man was a suspected suicide
bomber.
Another policeman, who was shot in the back during the
firefight, was left to bleed to death. "I went and checked his
pulse. He was barely alive," said Mr Mansi. "I asked the officer
to bring an ambulance, and he said: 'They are terrorists, they
shoot at us, the policemen'."
The rest of the raid passed without further bloodshed, unlike
Saturday when five uniformed policemen were shot dead in a
windowless room of a nearby building, apparently at close
range.
After the surrender of the policemen, civilian male residents of
the flats stripped, marched down stairs, and sur rendered. Then
came the women, pulling their shirts up above their waists,
residents said.
Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has described the broad
military offensive in the West Bank as a war on terror: that is,
against the Palestinian suicide bombers who have launched a
relentless campaign inside the Jewish state.
But in Ramallah at least, the focus appears to be the main
Palestinian police agency: the national security force, whose
commander in the West Bank, Haji Ismail, is one of Yasser
Arafat's most trusted aides.
Unlike other senior Palestinian officials, who have scattered, Mr
Ismail is said to be hunkered down in Mr Arafat's crumbling
headquarters, vowing to fight to the last alongside his leader.
Mr Ismail's men are the most professional of the Palestinian
police forces - which were trained by the CIA during the 1990s -
and their targeting by the Israeli army sits uneasily with Israel's
demands that Mr Arafat use the security forces to crack down
on the suicide bombers.
Yesterday, such doubts were beginning to emerge inside Israel
as well. "Even if we stay on a long time, we will not be able to
smash the terror infrastructure," said Danny Yatom, the former
chief of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
· Four Britons and a Japanese student from Bradford University
suffered shrapnel wounds yesterday after Israeli tanks fired
warning shots near international "peace volunteers" in the
Bethlehem suburb of Beit Jala. A woman who asked to be
known only as Kate suffered a serious stomach wound but was
said to be out of danger in hospital.
guardian.co.uk |
