Israeli Troops Storm Prison in West Bank, Seize Militants

Backed by tanks and bulldozers, Israeli soldiers besieged a Palestinian prison Tuesday, smashed through its walls and seized several militants jailed there in connection with the assassination of Israel’s tourism minister in 2001.

Israel said the daylong operation, completed just after dark, was carried out to prevent Palestinian authorities from releasing the militants. The prisoners included Ahmed Saadat, the leader of a leftist group who from his jail cell was elected in January to the Palestinian parliament.

Shortly after nightfall, Saadat and five other men sought by Israel surrendered to soldiers as army bulldozers and excavators chewed at the walls of the prison compound in this normally tranquil desert town.

“We will put them on trial and they will have to serve their sentences in a real prison, not a mock prison, and pay for the crime they have committed,” said Raanan Gissin, an Israeli government spokesman.

The Israeli raid came after the American and British governments decided to withdraw observers who had been assigned to ensure that the six men remained behind bars under a 4-year-old arrangement. The U.S. and Britain said they withdrew over long-standing concerns that the Palestinians could not guarantee the observers’ safety.

The raid triggered angry reactions by Palestinian militants, who seized at least eight foreigners in the Gaza Strip to express unhappiness over the British-American decision to leave the Jericho prison. Within several hours, all but three hostages -- two French nationals and a South Korean -- had been released.

The operation came two weeks before an Israeli election, and the relatively speedy capture of the militants appeared likely to help the prospects of acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his centrist Kadima movement. Palestinian officials accused Olmert of a provocative election-season maneuver.

Olmert’s aides said that the timing of the raid wasn’t linked to the campaign and that the operation was ordered after the pullout of the observers and recent suggestions by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that he might soon free Saadat. Israeli officials said they also were concerned that an incoming Palestinian government led by the militant movement Hamas would toss out prior agreements and release the prisoners.

“It had nothing to do with the election,” Gissin said. “It had to do with the decision by [Abbas] to abdicate his responsibility.”

Two people were reported killed during the siege: a Palestinian police officer and one of the estimated 300 inmates at the facility. Palestinian medical officials said more than a dozen people outside were injured in clashes between rock-throwing youths and Israeli soldiers who moved in to surround the prison.

The dusty fields around the compound echoed with the blasts of explosives detonated by Israeli troops to breach the prison walls and with periodic bursts of automatic-weapons fire between the Israelis and Palestinian guards. Most of the prisoners had trickled out by day’s end, many in their underwear to show that they were carrying no weapons. Saadat had told television stations by cellphone that he would not be taken alive, but he too eventually surrendered.

Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh said Tuesday that Israeli troops had been outside Jericho for days, waiting for the monitors to leave, the Associated Press reported.

Jericho, which bills itself as the world’s oldest town, occupies a relatively tranquil corner of the West Bank near the border with Jordan. Unlike other large West Bank cities such as Nablus and Ramallah, Jericho has seen relatively little military action by Israel during more than five years of recent conflict.

In reaction to the raid, a crowd in Gaza City overwhelmed Palestinian police and ransacked the headquarters of the British Council, while other groups hurled stones at European Union and United Nations offices. Protesters marched through the streets to decry the Israeli action and militants announced via loudspeaker that foreigners who remained could be abducted.

European Union officials who monitor Gaza’s border crossing with Egypt left their posts out of concern over the spate of abductions, leading to the closure of the crossing at Rafah.

Saadat’s leftist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, vowed reprisals against Israel. Saadat and four other PFLP members captured Tuesday are suspected of direct involvement in the fatal shooting of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi at a Jerusalem hotel in October 2001.

Palestinian officials condemned the Israeli operation, saying it had violated the agreement under which the prisoners were to be left in Palestinian hands. They also accused American and British officials of coordinating the withdrawal of the monitors with Israel.

“This operation could lead to very serious consequences,” outgoing Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Korei said in a statement soon after the raid got underway.

U.S. and British officials denied that the decision to pull out the observers had been made in concert with Israel. The officials, who long have complained about lax security at the prison, said they had jointly expressed misgivings about the safety of the overseers last week in a letter to Abbas.

That letter, provided to Israel, warned the Palestinians that the Americans and Britons might pull out.

“Our decision to withdraw [observers] was based solely on our concerns over their safety,” said Stewart Tuttle, the U.S. Embassy spokesman in Tel Aviv.

In London, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told Parliament that the two allies made their decision after having “repeatedly raised our concerns over the security of our monitors with the Palestinian Authority.” Straw complained that prison officials did not enforce restrictions on visitors, correspondence and cellphone use.

Saadat, accused by Israel of planning and ordering Zeevi’s slaying, had been held in the Jericho prison under the terms of a 2002 agreement brokered by U.S. and British officials.

The deal was aimed at ending an Israeli siege of Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where Saadat and five other men had been held out of the reach of Israeli authorities.

Under the arrangement, Palestinian officials imprisoned Saadat, and the four other PFLP members linked to the Zeevi killing, in Jericho with international supervision.

The arrangement also covered Fuad Shubaki, a former Arafat aide who was held in connection with an attempt to smuggle weapons aboard a ship to the Gaza Strip in 2002.

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Times staff writer Janet Stobart in London contributed to this report.