Israeli and Palestinian negotiators reached agreement in Cairo this week on terms for the deployment of Palestinian police in the Gaza Strip and West Bank town of Jericho.
In separate news conferences Tuesday, the Israel Defense Force deputy chief of staff, Gen. Amnon Shahak, who is heading the Israeli delegation, and Nabil Sha’ath, the chief Palestine Liberation organization negotiator, said they had agreed on all the details for the deployment of a 9,000-member Palestinian police force.
They said that 6,000 Palestinian police would start work immediately after the Cairo negotiations ended and Israel completed its troop withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho.
Another 1,000 police would assume duties soon afterward, and an additional 2,000 police would be recruited at a later date from the population of Gaza and Jericho.
The two parties also agreed on the terms of release for some 5,000 Palestinians currently held in Israeli jails.
But they disagreed whether members of the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas movement, which is staunchly opposed to the Israeli-PLO negotiations, would be among those released.
Shahak told reporters Tuesday, just before the two teams recessed the talks until next week, that no members of Hamas would be released.
“Only last week, we witnessed a Hamas attack in (the northern Israeli town of) Afula, which killed Israeli children. And the day after, the Hamas spokesman in Amman said they are going to continue,” said Shahak.
“We are not going to set onto the streets those who declare they are going to kill us,” he said.
Sha’ath, in turn, has been pressing the Israelis to release members of Hamas in order to show that the negotiations are for all the Palestinian people, not just those supporting the PLO.
According to Sha’ath, 2,500 prisoners will be released as soon as an agreement is signed in Cairo. An additional 2,500 will be set free three weeks after the signing, when the Palestinian authority takes over in Gaza and Jericho.
But the question still remains as to when the Cairo negotiations will be concluded.
Earlier in the week, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said the target date for concluding the negotiations would be the end of April – a timetable Sha’ath grudgingly agreed to.
But Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in an interview with the Jerusalem post that appeared Tuesday, said the talks would be concluded a couple of weeks later.
“We cannot put a date when the agreement will be reached,” he told the newspaper. “But if everything will go well, I believe by somewhere in the first half of May there is hope.”
Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat spoke by telephone on Tuesday, and the two discussed the status of the ongoing negotiations.
During the call, which Arafat initiated, Rabin stressed the need for making more rapid progress in the talks.
Earlier this week, Rabin responded to charges launched by the PLO that Israel was purposely delaying the talks. The prime minister said that it had been Arafat who suspended the negotiations after the Feb. 25 Hebron massacre and that any delays in the negotiations are therefore the PLO’s responsibility.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
