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Jewish militants may be jailed before gaza exit

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   http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L09398031.htm

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L09398031.htm

Jewish militants may be jailed before Gaza exit
09 May 2005 11:37:55 GMT

Source: Reuters

By Megan Goldin

JERUSALEM, May 9 (Reuters) - Israeli security forces are considering jailing scores of Jewish militants ahead of the army's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank later this year, security sources said on Monday.

They said the arrest of a Jewish settler on suspicion he was planning attacks on Palestinians could be the first of many detentions of ultranationalists before the evacuation of 21 settlements in Gaza and four of 120 in the West Bank.

The settler, Niria Ofen, was jailed on Sunday without trial until the end of September to ensure that he would not be involved in any violence aimed at thwarting the withdrawal, security sources said.

The pullout is scheduled to begin in July or August and will last several weeks. Jewish settlers and their supporters have threatened mass protests to block the evacuation and some have vowed to stop the withdrawal by all means at their disposal.

"What happened yesterday (with the arrest) may be the first of many," a security source said.

Israel rarely incarcerates Jewish militants under its administrative detention law, which has been used almost exclusively to put Palestinians accused of militancy in jail without trial, sometimes for years.

Israel's prosecutor-general and a senior judge need to approve administrative detention orders based on evidence against suspects collected by the Shin Bet security service.

Security sources said the Shin Bet was in the process of gathering evidence against other suspected Jewish militants in order to have them jailed before the withdrawal gets under way.

Jewish ultranationalists see the West Bank and Gaza, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, as a biblical birthright and fiercely oppose any handover of occupied land. Palestinians want the territories for a future independent state.

The settler put under administrative detention on Monday was from the Yitzhar settlement, a hotbed of Jewish militancy, in the northern West Bank. Israeli media reports said he was suspected of being involved in past attacks on Palestinians.

In February 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Jewish militant gunned down 29 Palestinians as they knelt in prayer at a shrine in the West Bank city of Hebron.

More recently, Israeli security forces arrested a Jewish militant cell that planted a bomb outside a girls' school in East Jerusalem in 2002. Police found the bomb and defused it before it was set to go off.

Jewish settlers called Ofen's arrest a vendetta.

"It was just a means to stop him from doing legitimate work and protesting democratically," said Yisrael Cohen, a spokesman for the ultranationalist group Revava.



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