Gaza Still in Limbo: 1st PLO Police Delayed

The banners were up. So were the flags--thousands of new Palestinian pennants cheering Gaza’s grim horizon with the official green, black, red and white of an autonomous land in waiting.

At the remote border post that separates the Gaza Strip from the Egyptian Sinai, hundreds of well-wishers sweated the day away Sunday, waiting eagerly to lavish the welcome of a lifetime on a Palestinian security force now synonymous with freedom.

But Gazans were forced to postpone yet another celebration of liberation. When the vanguard of Palestine Liberation Army veterans destined to be the core of a future Palestinian police force failed to cross the border and take control of the territory as advertised, a young Palestinian woman in this border town summed up the deepening frustration of a land now living in limbo.

Suha Farra was pressed up against the towering barbed-wire fence that splits Rafah in two, straddling the international border between Gaza and Egypt. It’s known as “The Shouting Fence.”

Farra had just finished shouting the latest news and gossip with her mother, who lives across the 30 yards of razor-wire and asphalt that was drawn as Gaza’s southern boundary years ago, when she reflected on how little has changed since Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed their agreement for self-rule beginning in Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho last week.

“We are waiting for a long time, and waiting is difficult,” she said. “People are totally sick and tired of this waiting now. Since we heard that this agreement giving us our freedom was signed last week, all we are doing is waiting.

“Days pass, and nothing happens.”

Amid conflicting accounts of the reasons for Sunday’s delay, Palestinian and Israeli officials said the police force that represents the first tangible symbol of promised Palestinian autonomy will, in fact, arrive this week--possibly today.

For the first time, the commander of the Israeli force that has occupied Gaza for the last 27 years met Sunday with the future Palestinian commander of the strip at Gaza’s border with Israel in the north to pave the way for what both sides hope will be a seamless transition from harsh occupation to self-rule.

Maj. Gen. Matan Vilnai, Israel’s Southern Front commander, said that an already complicated task is made more difficult because virtually all the Palestinian officers are strangers to the area.

“We have been there nearly 27 years, and they haven’t,” Vilnai said. “Their commander was in charge of Palestinian troops in Algeria two days ago; now he is here. He needs to switch his mind over, speak with an Israeli general and organize his forces in an area he has never been.”

Vilnai said Israel hopes that Israeli and Palestinian forces will begin their joint patrols in the middle of this week and that these will then pave the way for the introduction of the bulk of the 9,000-member Palestinian force.

Both Israelis and Palestinians will face a major test in working together, Vilnai said.

“You have to deal with the other side that until yesterday was your enemy, and that’s not so easy,” he said.

Israel took other steps Sunday to bolster Palestinian confidence, deploying a team of 117 international observers in the West Bank town of Hebron under an Israeli concession to restore security after the Feb. 25 massacre of about 30 Palestinian worshipers by a Jewish settler in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs.

But the impact of the new force of unarmed Norwegians, Danes and Italians appeared to be as lost as Sunday’s planned border celebrations in a city that is not included in the self-rule accord. Soon after their arrival, Hebron erupted in stone-throwing and tear gas when scores of Hebronites met the international force with chants, protests and derision.

“They are useless,” Abdallah Saleh, 21, said after the force arrived without weapons in spotless white uniforms that include bibs, baseball caps and armbands. “They cannot protect Arabs here. I don’t think they can protect themselves.”

Leaders of the observer force vowed to remain in Hebron for their mandated three months, whether or not their mission succeeds in restoring normalcy in an embattled town where 415 mostly armed Jewish settlers are surrounded by more than 100,000 mostly unarmed Palestinians.

And one Palestinian Hebronite, 21-year-old Rashid Bader, indicated that the new force--the first time in nearly three decades of occupation that Israel has permitted an international force in the territories--is not without support.

“We support their arrival,” he said, “and we hope peace will come.”

At the border crossings into the newly designated autonomous zones of Gaza and Jericho, though, all they hoped was that their own new security force would come--and soon.

In the border town of Jericho, the future capital of the two Palestinian enclaves, a planned celebration similar to that in Rafah turned into yet another altercation when Israeli security forces fired tear gas to quell a crowd whose frustration boiled over at the Allenby Bridge. The bridge is the crossing point into Jordan.

A force of 227 Palestinian fighters-turned-policemen were camped out at a pilgrims’ rest stop about a mile inside Jordan, and more than 500 others were en route from Iraq to join them. There, they will await PLO orders--and Israeli permission--to re-enter the land many of them fled during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

The commander of the force that will take over from the Israeli occupiers in Jericho, Brig. Gen. Mohammed Abdul-Rahim Qodsiyeh, blamed Israel for the delay. He told reporters that Israeli commanders and PLO officials were still negotiating terms of their entry.

But Israeli military sources in Gaza, where 330 former Palestinian fighters were camped in Egyptian territory just beyond the Rafah crossing, indicated that the PLO delayed the event to gather in large enough numbers for a dramatic show of force when they do roll into the strip.

Such details, though, were beyond the grasp--or interest--of most Gazans, who were as emphatic in stating their mounting expectations as their growing frustration.

Mohammed Migdal, for example, had planned a feast of celebration for Sunday to greet the new police force. When the Gaza City used-clothing merchant learned of the delay, he decided to take a nap instead.

But as he lay on the floor of his home in the city’s Sheikh Radwan district, where his 13-year-old son was accidentally shot and killed by Israeli soldiers last November, his eyes drifted to a large photograph of his son that graces his wall--not far from a large portrait of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.

“We hear from the Israelis that our police are arriving today. The PLO is saying our police will arrive today, and nothing has happened,” Migdal said. “What this means is, it’s just more and more frustration for us. They should say nothing and just let them come.”

Fineman reported from Gaza and Parks from Tel Aviv. Times researcher Dianna M. Cahn reported for this story from Hebron.