Israel Frees 570 Prisoners, Seeks to Draw PLO to Talks

With expressions of sorrow and gestures of reconciliation, Israel sought Tuesday to persuade Palestinians to resume peace negotiations despite a Jewish settler’s massacre of praying Muslims in a mosque in the occupied West Bank last week.

Israeli military authorities released 570 Palestinian prisoners held on security charges and said 300 more will be freed by Friday--roughly a tenth of the prisoners Israel holds.

Although protests over the massacre subsided in most parts of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israeli troops killed a Jewish settler and wounded his wife late Tuesday when they opened fire on the couple’s car near the West Bank settlement of Ariel. The soldiers said they were returning fire from the car.

Maj. Gen. Danny Yatom, the regional commander, had warned earlier of likely revenge attacks and said he was putting his forces on a higher state of alert. Troops also mistakenly shot two Israelis at a checkpoint Sunday.

Most of the Palestinians released Tuesday were from the West Bank; many were from Hebron, where the massacre occurred. Their release, originally planned for mid-March to mark the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, was pushed up as a goodwill gesture after the attack.

“We are trying to calm the situation in the (occupied) territories, to convince the Palestinians, the Arab world and the Muslim world that not only did we--the government and the army--have nothing to do with what happened, but also that we are repulsed, we are disgusted and we are shocked by it,” said Gad Ben-Ari, a spokesman for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “We hope that the negotiations with the Palestinians will be resumed as soon as possible.”

But Faisal Husseini, a senior leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Jerusalem, said many more prisoners should have been freed, if not all, and that as a goodwill gesture the release did not respond to the Palestinians’ grief over the massacre.

Israeli opposition leaders criticized the move as endangering the country’s security. “The gesture the government made to the PLO will cost us much in blood,” said Rehavam Zeevi, leader of the right-wing Homeland Party. “It’s an outrage. . . . I protest and oppose this with all my soul.”

Meanwhile, Ora Namir, the Israeli labor and social welfare minister, announced that the government’s welfare fund will pay compensation to families of those killed in the attack.

“We owe this humanitarian gesture to the Palestinians, to the Israelis and to the world,” Namir said. “We cannot treat with indifference this population that was so hurt.”

Each family will receive an initial payment of about $1,700, with the final amount dependent on the family’s size, Israeli officials said. On Monday, Saudi Arabia announced payments of $53,000 to each victim’s family.

Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau paid a condolence call on Sheik Hassan Tahboub, chairman of the Higher Islamic Council, on Tuesday to express Israeli grief over the Hebron attack. “I came to him with a message of peace stemming from a wish to calm the atmosphere,” Lau said after visiting Tahboub’s office adjacent to Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City. “There is no reason why we cannot return to living together in peace.”

A delegation from the leftist Meretz Party also met Islamic leaders. “We are ashamed that the murderer was a Jew, and we came to be with you in this awful, tragic and hard time,” Ran Cohen, a member of Parliament, told Tahboub. “But this is a time for you and us to be courageous and continue building a peaceful life for you, for ourselves and between us.”

Under the government’s instructions, teachers in Israel’s state schools are conducting discussions this week among students on the value of human life, on democracy and on the search for peace in the region.

“It’s important for students to discuss what happens around them, and the educational system is central to Israeli culture,” said Rivka Shraga, a spokeswoman for the Education Ministry. “This is the place to examine things, that hard and difficult things that come in life, and to express anger if there is any.”

A survey by an Israeli market research company for the International Center for Peace in the Middle East found that 79% of those surveyed condemned the action of Baruch Goldstein, the Brooklyn-born doctor who fired at least three magazines of bullets from his assault rifle at the backs of the kneeling Muslims.

But 11% of those questioned said it “had to be understood against the background of Arab terror against Jews,” and 3.6% praised the killer, according to the Teleseker polling firm.

Although four Israeli investigations are now under way, the number of people killed Friday remains uncertain. Palestinian human rights groups and West Bank hospitals had reported that 48 died. But Israeli military authorities said Tuesday that Goldstein killed 30 in the Cave of the Patriarchs and that troops outside killed five more in ensuing protests.

An independent Israeli commission is expected to begin its investigation next week, and it may be able to make the final determination only if it receives Palestinian cooperation.

Police Minister Moshe Shahal said security forces are searching for leaders of the extremist Kach movement to which the killer belonged and will detain them for three months under military orders or restrict their activities and travel. A partial list has been drawn up, he said, and police are reviewing their files for others.