Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin will consider easing restrictions on the Palestinian population in the administered territories, according to two Knesset members who met with him in his office here Monday.
Amnon Rubinstein and Yitzhak Artzi, members of the new Center movement, said Rabin’s concessions would be contingent on the continuation of the present relative calm in the territories.
According to one report, the concessions could include a reform of the administrative detention appeals process.
Meanwhile, the head of the civil administration in the West Bank, Col. Rami Yadin, handed over a check for 35,000 shekels ($22,000) to a resident of Beita village, near Nablus, as compensation for the destruction of his home by the Israel Defense Force in April.
The IDF demolished 14 homes in Beita as a punitive measure against villagers who took part in an April 6 confrontation with teen-age Jewish hikers from nearby the nearby settlement of Eilon Moreh.
The man who received the check was found to have had no part in the incident, and the payment was an admission of the IDF’s error.
In another development, a military court on Sunday sentenced Pvt. Yaacov Tamir, 24, to one year in prison for manslaughter in the Gaza Strip last January.
The soldier was found guilty of the unwarranted shooting of a local storekeeper, who approached the military truck in which Tamir was riding while other soldiers were chasing stone-throwers.
Tamir, who emigrated from Ethiopia four years ago, was found to have been under great emotional strain at the time of his induction into the armed forces. The military court criticized the decision to assign him to combat duty.
In another security development, two firebombs were thrown into an empty Egged bus parked at the central bus station in East Jerusalem on Monday. No one was hurt and the damage was slight.
MAY REPLACE APPEALS BOARDS
During his meeting with the two Knesset members, Rabin reportedly said he might replace the military appeals boards with a judge authorized to overturn administrative arrests.
Under the present system, there is no judicial supervision of administrative detention. The only recourse a detainee has is to the military appeals boards, which so far have heard only a tiny fraction of the cases.
Administrative detention, a holdover from the British Mandate, allows the authorities to detain a person for renewable six-month periods without filing formal charges or bringing them to trial. There are presently some 1,900 Palestinians under administrative detention.
Rubinstein and Artzi, who were to leave Tuesday for a conference of the Liberal International, said they would introduce legislation to declare Rabbi Meir Kahane’s extremist Kach party illegal in the administered territories.
That would empower the Defense Ministry to disarm Kach members carrying weapons in the territories.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
