Jericho prison siege further undermines PA leader

By Harvey Morris
March 16, 2006
The Financial Times
Original Source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/fc27dff2-b491-11da-bd61-0000779e2340.html

The Jericho prison siege appears to have further undermined the shaky leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority president, who yesterday toured the ruins left behind by the Israeli army and declared its raid an unforgivable crime.
Israeli media uniformly praised the nine-hour mission on Tuesday in which the army partly destroyed the Palestinian-run compound to force the surrender of jailors and inmates, among them six of Israel's most wanted men. The action followed the withdrawal of British monitors assigned to supervise their detention.
Mr Abbas, still negotiating the terms of a political cohabitation between him and an incoming Hamas-led government due to be announced within two weeks, cut short a European trip and returned home to confront the crisis.
This was a severe blow to the Palestinian Authority and to Abu Mazen [as Mr Abbas is also known], said Saeb Erekat, Palestinian negotiator and Jericho's most prominent resident, who accompanied him on the tour.
The siege, which Mr Abbas and other officials blamed on collusion between Israel, Britain and the US, was another humiliation for the Palestinians who watched live television footage of their security forces being forced to surrender, some of them stripped to their underwear.
Until the Israeli army entered on Tuesday morning, Jericho was the only area of the West Bank that it had acknowledged as being under Palestinian security control.
It was a humiliation the absent Mr Abbas could seemingly have done nothing to avert.
Israel rejected a compromise offered on Tuesday under which the detainees would have been transferred to his control.
The crisis came as the prospects of Mr Abbas acting as an alternative power centre to the incoming government appeared to be waning. International donor countries seem to have backed away from the option of using the president as a conduit for funding the operations of the PA and are turning towards concentrating on humanitarian assistance.
James Wolfensohn, international Middle East peace envoy, told the US Senate foreign relations committee yesterday that the international community should avoid hasty decisions that might be seen as pun-ishing or isolating the Palestinians.
Seeking to engage international and non-governmental organisations in the provision of basic services to the Palestinian people may be useful in helping some donors address legal issues that impede providing assistance to or through a new Hamas-led PA government, while enabling their continued support of the Palestinian people, he said.
There are questions, however, about the time needed to establish acceptable new mechanisms for delivering assistance, the willingness of these groups to participate, and their capacity to doso.
The Gaza Strip and West Bank were already facing increasing international isolation, even before the popular backlash against events in Jericho.
After armed gangs abducted a dozen foreigners on Tuesday (all had been released by yesterday), international agencies withdrew foreign staffers and Israel barred access to Gaza. The Israeli army, which requires foreigners to sign a security waiver before they cross into Gaza, cited the wave of kidnappings.
The United Nations, res-ponsible for the welfare of Palestinian refugees, had no foreign personnel in Gaza yesterday and travel to the West Bank was restricted.
Amid calls for calm from Palestinian officials, including leaders of Hamas, it was likely that international agencies would relax the restrictions.
*Tony Blair, UK prime minister, yesterday warned the Palestinians to tighten security if they wanted continued British help to establish a permanent sovereign homeland,writes Miranda Green in London.
Speaking in parliament, he defended the decision to pull out unarmed British monitors from the jail saying they had been withdrawn because the Palestinians had failed to adhere to the terms under which they had been allowed control of detained terrorist suspects.
The idea that this was either precipitate or un-called-for or not thought through is simply wrong, Mr Blair said.
He said Hamas had to help by adhering to its side of agreements if the party wanted to secure continued economic and political ties with the UK.