Al-Jazeera Skewers PA: Collaborated in Killing 'Own People'

by Herb Keinon


Al-Jazeera relentlessly continued to pound the PA leadership Tuesday night with its latest dump of Palestinian documents, essentially accusing it of collaboration with Israel in the killing of terrorists.

In a story on its English-language website titled “The al- Madhoun assassination,” the network, basing itself on handwritten notes of a meeting between then-defense minister Shaul Mofaz and Palestinian Authority minister of interior Nasser Youssef, writes that the PA has “shown operational willingness to co-operate with Israel to kill its own people, the Palestine Papers indicate.”

At a meeting in 2005 in Tel Aviv, Mofaz is quoted as asking Youssef why the PA doesn’t kill Hassan al-Madhoun, affiliated with Fatah’s Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades and someone Israel said was behind deadly attacks at Ashdod Port and the Karni crossing.

Youssef says that instructions were given to the head of Fatah’s Preventive Security Organization in Gaza, and “we’ll see.”

“He is not Hamas and you can kill him,” Mofaz is quoted as saying, to which Youssef replies, “We work, the country is not easy, our capabilities are limited, and you haven’t offered anything.”

Less than a month later, according to Al-Jazeera, Madhoun was killed by a missile fired by an Israeli helicopter.

The Al-Jazeera piece then jumps four years, and quotes chief PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat in September 2009 – discussing the policies of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with State Department official David Hale – as saying, “We have had to kill Palestinians to establish one authority, one gun and the rule of law. We continue to perform our obligations. We have invested time and effort and killed our own people to maintain order and the rule of law.”

Al-Jazeera omits the overall context of that statement, which was Erekat complaining that Netanyahu was not forthcoming in the diplomatic process, while the PA had done so much, and then writes, “It is not clear as to which killings Erekat is referring to but the discussion about the plan to kill Madhoun is just one example of how, since the death of Yasser Arafat, Fatah’s policy of resistance to Israel has become one of collaboration.”

However, the PA denied on Tuesday that it had been coordinating security with Israel.

Gen. Adnan Dmairi, spokesman for the PA security forces, said it was wrong to talk about coordination. Instead, he said, the PA has been holding various forms of “contacts” with Israel in keeping with the Oslo Accords.

“The Oslo Accords set up District Coordination Offices between the two sides,” Dmairi pointed out. “We have security, political, social, economic and civil contacts with Israel to serve the interest of our people.”

He said the documents presented by Al-Jazeera were forged.

Earlier, PA negotiator Nabil Shaath admitted that the documents were authentic.

Dmairi claimed that more than 2,000 members of the various branches of the PA security forces had been killed by Israel since the PA’s establishment in 1994.

He also said that 1,326 members of the security forces were being held in Israeli prisons, and he accused Israel of destroying most of the headquarters of the PA security forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

He boasted that 682 Fatah members had been killed in the conflict with Israel in the past decade.

“We are not a state, and we live under occupation,” Dmairi said.

“And we don’t have big US military bases, like Qatar does, on our lands.”

The documents released Tuesday by Al-Jazeera also include a British security plan presented to the PA in 2003 for cracking down on Hamas.

A summary of the plan says that it is a “British MI6 plan for Palestinian security, in which the British government discusses training officers and restoring cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian agencies, as well as other initiatives focused on withdrawal of IDF troops and building Palestinian capability.”

The plan, according to the summary, “includes the following language about dealing with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ): ‘2. Degrading the capabilities of the rejectionists – Hamas, PIJ and the Al-Aksa Brigades – through the disruption of their leaderships’ communications and command and control capabilities; the detention of key middle-ranking officers; and the confiscation of their arsenals and financial resources held within the Occupied Territories, US and – informally – UK monitors would report both to Israel and to the Quartet. We could also explore the temporary internment of leading Hamas and PIJ figures, making sure they are well treated, with EU funding.”

This plan was passed by the MI6 to the PA security official at the time, Jibril Rajoub.

The British Guardian daily, with which Al-Jazeera shared the leaked documents, reported on its website that in 2009, the PA, which publicly was castigating Israel for its “siege” of Gaza, told US envoy George Mitchell that Egypt and Israel needed to do more to seal tunnels bringing arms and goods into the Strip.

Erekat told Mitchell that he’d had a conversation with the Defense Ministry’s Amos Gilad, in which he said, “What’s going on with you and the US, the $23 million [donated by the US to block the tunnels]. It’s business as usual in the tunnels – the Hamas economy.”

Original URL: http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=205224

Herb Keinon

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