ISRAELI police evicted dozens of Palestinian activists early Sunday from a first-of-its-kind protest camp they set up in a West Bank area slated for Jewish settlement.
Police and activists confirmed that hundreds of Israeli police entered the campsite in the controversial E1 area on the outskirts of Jerusalem at around 2:30 am (00.030 GMT) on Sunday
They quickly bundled around 200 Palestinian activists at the Bab al-Shams (Gate of the Sun in Arabic) camp into buses and drove them from the site.
The camp has been set up on Friday in the E1 area between Israeli annexed east Jerusalem and the Maaleh Adumim settlement.
Israel recently moved forward with plans to build in the area, drawing international criticism for the move, which Palestinians say would effectively end the chances for the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state.
‘Hundreds of Israeli police came from all directions, surrounding all those who were in the tents and arresting them one by one,’ Palestinian legislator Mustafa Barghouti said.
But police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said that no arrests had been made.
‘They were told they were trespassing and carefully escorted from the site one by one,’ he said.
‘Nobody was hurt on either side,’ he added, saying around 500 police took part in the operation.
Protest organisers said that six people were injured during the operation, and that those detained were taken elsewhere in the West Bank by bus and released.
In a statement, the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee group that organised the camp vowed that the protest would not be the last of its kind.
‘This is not the end of the popular struggle and it will continue in its full strength.’
Speaking to Israeli army radio, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat praised the protest, saying, ‘Palestinians are trying to protect the land of their state and they have done something peaceful.
‘It was shameful for the Israeli government to do what they did this morning,’ he added.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s office said on Saturday night that he wanted the protesters removed at once and that state lawyers were asking the Israeli Supreme Court to overturn a Friday injunction postponing the eviction.
In documents released to the media, the lawyers argued that the protest could attract rightwing Israeli settlers, ‘some of them extremists’, who would stage counter-demonstrations that could result in ‘breaches of the peace against Palestinians and security forces.’
The court did not overturn the injunction before the eviction, but activists said they were told that Israeli officials considered the injunction prevented only the removal of the tents, and not the eviction of activists.
The camp is a new tactic in the Palestinian arsenal of non-violent protest action against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
‘This is a new type of resistance, different to armed resistance or stone-throwing,’ 27-year-old protester Omar Ghassan, said.
It is modelled on the wildcat outposts that Jewish activists have set up on Palestinian land to try to force the government’s hand into authorising settlements, though Palestinian protesters noted that Israel’s government moves slowly, if at all, to dismantle Jewish outposts in the West Bank.
The international community regards all Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land as illegal, but the Israeli government makes a distinction between those it has authorised and those it has not.
• Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas and exiled Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal have agreed to expedite a stalled reconciliation deal between the rival factions, a Hamas official said Thursday.
The decision came at a meeting in Cairo that was the first in almost a year between the West Bank’s Fatah leader Abbas and Meshaal, who heads the Hamas movement that rules the Gaza Strip, and was aimed at ending years of bitter and sometimes deadly rivalry.
‘The two parties agreed to call on all Palestinian factions to implement the reconciliation agreement,’ Hamas politburo member Izzat al-Rishq, who attended the gathering, said.
It was held in a ‘very good and promising atmosphere,’ he added.
Fatah and Hamas officials will meet soon to discuss further developments, Rishq said, but did not give a date or more details.
‘Fatah and Hamas agree on launching measures of reconciliation,’ Egyptian state television quoted Yasser Ali, spokesman for Egypt’s Islamist President Mohamed Mursi, as saying.
On their visit to Cairo, Abbas and Meshaal also held separate talks with Mursi.
Meshaal and Abbas focused on implementing the Egypt-brokered April 2011 unity agreement aimed at ending years of infighting that was signed in May that year, but whose main provisions have yet to be put into practice.
The Palestinian national movements’ rivalry exploded into violence in June 2007 when Hamas forces seized control of Gaza a year after they won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections.
Meshaal met Abbas in Cairo in February 2012, but there has been little progress towards ending the crippling divide between their movements.
In his meeting with Abbas, Mursi discussed Palestinian reconciliation, the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the financial woes of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, which Fatah dominates.
‘Mursi promised to work towards lifting the Gaza blockade and helping Palestinians out of their financial crisis, lobbying donors and (our) Arab brothers,’ Fatah’s lead negotiator Azzam al-Ahmed said.
Egypt has boosted support for Gaza since Mursi was elected president in June.
Even before the Palestinian leaders met last Wednesday, there was no let-up in recriminations.
‘Egypt’s invitation does not necessarily mean this meeting will lead to a serious start of implementing’ the agreement, said Yousef Rizq, political adviser to Hamas’s prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniya.
‘Abbas’s insistence on holding elections first affects the atmosphere of the meeting,’ he said, stressing that all the provisions in the agreement should go into effect simultaneously.
But Ahmed said Abbas wanted the election committee to resume its work, ‘and after the committee ends its work, and there is a consensus government, then there will be elections.’
He said a senior Hamas official had told him the reconciliation deal should be implemented after the Islamist movement ‘reorders its house’ – in an allusion to possible elections for a new leadership for the Islamist group.
Egyptian officials have said that a reconciliation deal that would allow Hamas representation in the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organisation, historically headed by Fatah, and the formation of a unity government, are opposed by Washington.
The United States, along with other Western countries and Israel, say Hamas must renounce violence and recognise Israel.
Hamas is officially sworn to Israel’s destruction but says it could accept a Palestinian state on the basis of the lines that existed before the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem.
