PLO, Israel Clash on Prisoners in Talks

Two Palestine Liberation Organization delegates walked out of talks with Israel on Sunday, and the chief PLO delegate said it was unacceptable that the Jewish state refused to free militant prisoners.

The two sides also clashed on Israel’s insistence that Palestinian courts have no jurisdiction over foreigners visiting their relatives in Jewish settlements in Gaza.

Chief PLO negotiator Nabil Shaath said this was, however, an improvement on Israel’s previous position--that all foreigners should be immune from Palestinian law.

“It is still a horror on a miniature scale,” he added. “We do not accept their whole approach to jurisdiction.”

The other two delegates, Mohamed Dahlan and Jibril Rojoub, walked out in protest over Israel’s distinction between prisoners who support the peace talks and those from Hamas, a fundamentalist Islamic group that opposes the talks and continues to attack Israelis.

“Nothing has been achieved. This is why we walked out. We stopped everything and we left because of that,” Dahlan said after a meeting to discuss a timetable for Palestinian deportees to go home and for Israel to free Palestinian prisoners.

“Israel should release all the Palestinian prisoners. This is a national Palestinian demand not subject to any discussion,” Rojoub said.

“There is no compromise. There is only one solution--the release of all prisoners,” he added.

Israel has said it cannot release people who might perform acts of violence. In the last two weeks, members of Hamas have killed 12 Israelis in two suicide bombings.

The talks, now in their fifth month, focus on practical details of Israeli withdrawal and Palestinian rule in the Gaza Strip and the Jericho area in the West Bank, as agreed in principle in September.

Two deadlines set when Israel and the PLO signed that agreement have been missed.

Israel was to have started withdrawing its forces from the two areas by Dec. 13, and the withdrawal should have ended by last Wednesday.

Shaath said that he sympathized with Dahlan but that the talks were not deadlocked.

“We did not get any better than the 5,000 (prisoners) discussed last week,” he said. “We are obviously concerned, but again I am not saying that the door is closed on anything. We are still in a spirit of positive negotiations.”

Israel’s stand on prisoners is embarrassing to the PLO, which wants to win the sympathy of opponents of the agreement by portraying the peace deal as a national, not a factional, matter.

Shaath said Maj. Gen. Amnon Shahak, head of the Israeli delegation, and Israeli legal adviser Yoel Singer told him on arrival Sunday that they believed they would complete details of the agreement this week and would finalize it next week.