A Defense Ministry spokesmen said today that Israel will not agree to changes in the terms under which it released some 4,500 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners two weeks ago in exchange for six Israeli soldiers held prisoner by the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The statement was issued in response to charges by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva yesterday that Israel had reneged on the exchange agreement in the cases of an unspecified number of Palestinians serving sentences in Israeli prisons for terrorist acts.
The spokesmen insisted that Israel acted in “good faith” but conceded there were some clerical errors due to the pressure of time in carrying out the exchange and the large number of prisoners involved. Most of those freed were internees in south Lebanon but 63 were convicted terrorists held in Israel.
A ranking official of the ICRC said Israel had failed to produce some of the prisoners on its list when the exchange was effected at Ben Gurion Airport. Red Cross personnel were not aware of the discrepancy at the time, the official said, but the episode damaged the credibility of the Red Cross and might compromise its future interventions in the Middle East.
A Geneva newspaper accused Israel of cheating. A PLO representative in Geneva, Nabil Ramlawi, claimed that Israel was withholding 37 prisoners agreed to in the exchange and if they are not released, the PLO would not return the bodies of Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon.
ONE PALESTINIAN STILL IN JAIL
Israeli authorities admitted last week that one Palestinian supposed to have been released was still in jail but attributed this to clerical errors on the part of Red Cross personnel.
The man in question, Ziad Abu Ain, was convicted last year of having planted a bomb which killed two persons and injured 36 in the Tiberias marketplace several years ago. He was tried here after Israel obtained his extradition from the U.S. where he had fled and was living with relatives in Chicago.
An Israel Defense Force spokesman said Abu Ain was not released with the other prisoners because his name was not on the Red Cross lists from which the IDF and the Red Cross worked to organize the exchange. But according to his lawyer, Felicia Langer, he was in fact on the list.
Langer produced a signed affidavit in which Abu Ain says he was taken to Ben Gurion Airport to be put aboard a plane with other prisoners but at the last minute he was separated from them by Israeli soldiers and returned to prison. The Jerusalem Post reported that it learned from “various sources” that Abu Ain’s name was on one Red Cross list but was misspelled on another and “the resulting confusion was exploited by the Israeli authorities.”
The Defense Ministry spokesman conceded today that Abu Ain was not released because of an error on the list submitted by the Red Cross, compounded by subsequent errors by the IDF representative at Ben Gurion Airport. He did not say whether he will now be freed.
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