Humiliating surrender for Palestinian police
Guardian, April 2, 2002
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.
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