Many Palestinians Angered by Jailings in Jericho

Palestinians have a derisive new name for the prison that sits just off the dusty main road in this ancient desert town. They call it “Guantanamo Jericho,” a reference to the military base in Cuba where the U.S. is imprisoning suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

There is widespread anger among Palestinians about the terms of a U.S.-brokered agreement in which Israel on Wednesday released Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat after a monthlong siege of his headquarters. In exchange, the Palestinians transferred six men wanted by Israel to the military facility here, where they are jailed by Palestinians but monitored by a team of Americans and Britons.

Shopkeeper Jamila Hamed Saleh said the Palestinian leader should have stayed in his shattered offices rather than cut such a deal. “I think he has put his personal interest before the people’s interest,” said Saleh, 58, in the tiny grocery store she owns in the shadow of the biblical Mount of Temptation.

She and others interviewed Thursday, the day after the men arrived at the prison, said the unusual monitoring arrangements were an affront to Palestinian sovereignty. And Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said he anticipates protests outside his office here.

On Thursday, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, a radical Palestinian faction held a town hall meeting to criticize the deal. Members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine erected a model jail cell with a picture of their leader, one of those in custody, and draped it with paper replicas of American and British flags. A sign read: “Out with CIA collaborators, their agents and ideologues.”

Another PFLP leader declared the deal cut for the prisoners a “black chapter” in the history of the Palestinian Authority.

But inside Jericho’s gated, British mandate-era military headquarters, the team of American and British monitors was settling in Thursday, working its first shifts and waiting for more members to arrive, according to Palestinian and Western officials.

Watchful guards outside the compound’s tall, white metal gates shooed away anyone who lingered for more than a moment, saying entry was forbidden.

The team is made up of people with experience in prisons or international monitoring efforts, including several former British army officers, the officials said. They will not be armed. Ten members, mostly from Britain, have arrived, with others expected by Saturday.

“What we are doing is verifying that the Palestinians are holding them,” a Western official said. “We’re watching to make sure that they comply with their own laws and regulations, then reporting back to the two sides.”

Israel has long accused the Palestinians of quickly releasing most suspects they arrest. The official said the Palestinians, rather than being angry about the deal, should look on the presence of the monitors as an opportunity to demonstrate their compliance.

In an interview with Israel Radio on Thursday, the British ambassador to Israel, Sherard Cowper-Coles, said the idea for the monitoring grew out of a conversation between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in November, in which Blair made a general offer of British help in fighting terrorism.

The ambassador said the group’s preliminary guidelines were being drawn up by Andrew Coyle, the former warden of a high-security facility holding many IRA prisoners.

The six men transferred Wednesday are the only prisoners being held in the Jericho facility. Damaged in a brief Israeli incursion last fall, it had not housed any prisoners for some time.

Erekat said once he heard that the facility, built in 1932, might be used, he made hurried arrangements for it to be repaired and painted, for furniture to be moved in and air-conditioning installed.

Mohammed Lotfi, 22, said he was among those who helped, even though he believes the prisoners should not have been arrested. The men, he said in an interview near Jericho’s vegetable market, “were defending the honor of the Palestinian people.”

Of the six prisoners, four were accused in the shooting death of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi last fall, and were convicted by the Palestinians in a cursory trial recently inside Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters.

The others, PFLP leader Ahmed Saadat and Arafat’s financial officer, Fuad Shubaki, have yet to stand trial, and Erekat said the Palestinian attorney general must decide soon whether to charge them or let them go.

The monitors will find themselves in a sleepy desert oasis that had held promise for the Palestinians as a tourist attraction.

Sleek new cable cars ferried tourists, including many Israelis, up to the Mount of Temptation, and a $50-million casino on the edge of town attracted gamblers by the score. But the beginning of the Palestinian intifada in September 2000 frightened the tourists away, and both the cable car and the casino are now shuttered. A gleaming, 181-room Intercontinental Hotel beside the casino averages a single guest a month, a desk clerk said.

So if the American and British monitors ever enter her grocery store, Saleh said, she will welcome them despite her concerns about their role in Jericho. “If they stop here, like anyone else, they are welcome,” she said.