Palestinian fighters accused Jordan yesterday of sending officers to scout the West Bank without the knowledge of President Yasser Arafat, raising fears Amman could set terms in a territory Palestinians want for a state.
| Like the Egyptians are gonna do in Gaza... |
Jordan, which with Egypt has offered to train Palestinian security forces to take over areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip where Israel plans to end its occupation, denied the report that Jordanian Army officers had secretly toured Jenin.
Palestinian Authority officials said they asked Jordan for clarification. Israeli officials did not immediately comment. In the 1980s Israel held short-lived talks with Amman on restoring Jordanâs civil administration over the territory. According to the Jenin head of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group in Arafatâs Fatah faction, five Jordanian high-level officers visited the West Bank city on Friday as civilians. âFirst they told me they were here to make a film, but then they told me they were touring the West Bank and other parts of the Arab world,â Zakaria Al-Zubaidi told Reuters. âThey met with junior Palestinian security officials and were interviewing people after Friday prayers.â Zubaidi said he asked the officers to leave Jenin after discovering that their visit had not been coordinated with Arafat, whom Israel has tried to sideline by confining him to the rubble of his headquarters in Ramallah. âI told them we welcome the Arab presence to retrain our security forces, which Israel destroyed, but with conditions,â he said. âFirst they have to talk to our president, Yasser Arafat... and we are against retraining security forces that will work on aborting the intifada,â Zubaidi added.
| "We ain't gonna put up with nobody imposing public order, y'know..." |
The Foreign Ministry in Amman, which on Thursday rejected rumors of a joint military patrol with Israel of the West Bankâs Jordan Valley, yesterday reiterated this denial. âThere is no presence of Jordanian personnel in the West Bank,â a Foreign Ministry spokesman said. Uncertainty has flooded Palestinian streets since Israelâs government approved in principle a plan by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to remove all settlements from all of Gaza but only four in the West Bank â all of them in the vicinity of Jenin. Sharon casts his âdisengagement planâ as a bid to break the Middle East deadlock, but many Palestinians fear it is a ploy to cement Israelâs hold on much of the West Bank and deny them a viable independent statehood. |