Former Palestinian Prisoner Celebrates Freedom--in Jail : Autonomy: A jubilant underground leader shows off cell after Israelis relinquish central symbol of Gaza’s occupation.

Mahmoud Ata abu Khour went back to jail Monday--a free man, well armed and euphoric--on the day the Gaza Strip all but became a free land. There was no stopping the 35-year-old onetime Palestinian prisoner as he led more than a dozen heavily armed fellow guerrillas through the gate of the central jail here.

Abu Khour, a leader of the underground Fatah Hawks resistance and once one of Gaza’s most-wanted men, wielded an Uzi submachine gun as he broke into the jail. He stood on the running board of a van bristling with assault weapons and then shouted victory slogans as he blew past a dumbstruck force of newly arrived Palestinian security police.

The officers were a confused, ragtag outfit wearing military uniforms but with no beds, radios or food--and few orders--when they inherited the sprawling facility from Israel’s withdrawing occupation forces a few hours earlier.

“I want to see my cell. I want to see this place where I was a prisoner for 15 years! Can’t you understand that?” Abu Khour explained through the chaos to the Palestinian colonel now in charge.

The colonel, himself a refugee warrior who had returned to Gaza in the middle of the night Sunday after decades in exile, never even considered saying no. And after Abu Khour inspected every inch of a jail that was his home for nearly half his life, the colonel simply shrugged when Abu Khour and his men fired hundreds of rounds into the air in an explosive celebration in the heart of Gaza City’s downtown.

This was the day when the Israelis turned over to the new Palestinian paramilitary force the last of the major military facilities that were Israel’s instruments of occupation in Gaza. This, effectively, was the end of 27 years of Israel’s military occupation in this impoverished land.

But the scene here at the prison--a bitter symbol of the Israeli rule--also spoke volumes about the disarray in Palestinian ranks as they try to find a delicate balance between the many armed groups and their future struggle to assert new authority over Gaza and its 850,000 desperate Palestinians.

Monday’s celebrations, for example, included gripping scenes of families reunited after decades of exile and occupation. But this was also a day of continued violence elsewhere in the occupied lands: Jewish settlers opened fire on Palestinians, wounding at least nine, in Hebron near the site of the February massacre by a Jewish settler of about 30 Palestinians at prayer. And critics of the “Gaza-Jericho first” Palestinian autonomy agreement had harsh words on this day--even in Gaza itself, reminding all who would listen that Israel is not, after all, withdrawing from the whole of Gaza.

Under the self-rule agreement signed in Cairo earlier this month, the Palestinian autonomy begins in Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho. But Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed that Israeli troops will maintain bases inside nearly a dozen Jewish settlements that will remain in Gaza. Israeli troops will continue to patrol roads the settlers use to commute from Gaza to Israel.

In effect, senior Israeli military officers said, Israel will still control almost 40% of Gaza’s land to protect 5,000 Israeli settlers. Israel will also control Gaza’s borders, air space and territorial waters in the Mediterranean Sea. As of late Monday, at Palestinian request, Israeli troops also still held two small buildings in Gaza City.

All in all, for many Gazans, the autonomy agreement offered too little too late, after a rebellion against the occupation that killed hundreds of Palestinians and imprisoned thousands more.

“There are Palestinian police on the ground but Israeli helicopters in the sky and at our borders--this is not freedom,” said Moyin Rizik, a nurse at a U.N. clinic in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp who has treated hundreds of Palestinians injured in clashes with Israeli forces for seven years. “For a quarter-century fight against occupation, it’s not enough.”

The hand-over of the major Israeli facility did hearten hundreds of gleeful Gazans on Monday. They offered food, greetings, cigarettes and goodwill nearby at the towering barbed-wire fence that still surrounds the police base that the Palestinian troops took over from Israel.

“In the past 24 hours, everything has changed here,” Mohammed Masaroud, Jabaliya’s respected mayor for 30 years, declared as he delivered a load of new pipes, fluorescent lights and wiring. “For us, it is enough not to see these Israelis anymore. Just to feel we can walk freely in the streets, to know no soldiers can shoot the small children anymore, to sleep knowing the soldiers can’t come to your home at night--that’s enough for us. Not even food and water is as important to us as this.”

But such commodities were vital to the new police--the reconstituted members of the Palestine Liberation Army who had traveled for three days from their base in Sudan to find no food or water at the Jabaliya military camp.

Col. Hassan Alnaggar, commander of the Jabaliya detachment, conceded that his unit is ill prepared for its mission. But he said that all will pass soon.

Meantime, he said, the Palestinian security force, which will ultimately number 9,000 armed men in Gaza and Jericho, will ride on a wave of emotion and goodwill that ran deep Monday.

“I cannot even tell you my feeling. It came from somewhere inside my heart that I cannot describe in words,” said Alnaggar, 50, who fled the Gaza Strip when he was 23 after the Arab-Israeli war in which Israel conquered Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan.

But his counterpart--the Palestinian colonel ordered in the middle of the night to take over the massive military facility that includes Gaza City’s central jail--was less sanguine Monday. After three nights without sleep and two days without food, his new camp was being overrun by well-wishers, curiosity-seekers and scavengers.

Dozens of boys, for example, had clambered through new holes in the security fence to scavenge for spent bullet shells, which sell for almost $3 each in local markets.

Neither the colonel in charge nor his men had ever seen the jail facility before Monday, and all appeared unprepared for what was inside it. When asked about sophisticated antennas the Israelis left behind, the colonel--who declined to give his name--just shrugged. He simply rolled his eyes and walked away when Abu Khour and his band forced their way in for a self-guided tour.

“Here! Here! B Section, Cell 26! I spent three years in this bed,” Abu Khour reminisced in a small room with 18 double bunks. “And here, Cell 9! I slept here for two years. Here, this is where they beat me to confess. And here, on this staircase, this is where I slashed the face of a Palestinian collaborator with a knife! That got me 10 more years.”

With a video cameraman in tow, the group passed through interrogation rooms. They ripped Hebrew signs and symbols of Judaism off the walls with shouts of “Allahu Akbar!” (God is Great). And they lingered in the yard that had offered their only glimpse of the sun.

“This is a happiness so great, there are no words for it,” Abu Khour said. “I never believed I would be back here as a free man. This is truly a great day.”