Palestinians Face Internal Violence

[boblandis]

By LAURA KING

AP Special Correspondent

March 16, 2002, 1:45 PM EST

BETHLEHEM, West Bank -- One was strung up by his heels in the middle of a downtown traffic circle. The battered body of another was dragged through the streets before assailants tried to hang the corpse from a rooftop overlooking the traditional site of Jesus' birth. Two more were snatched off a West Bank road, driven to a deserted slaughterhouse and riddled with bullets.

Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel have frequently been targeted by fellow Palestinians during nearly 18 months of bitter fighting with Israel, but in recent days, the pace of these vigilante-style killings has picked up sharply. Seven suspected collaborators have been slain by Palestinian gunmen in the past week alone, compared to about two dozen until then.

The killings echo a grim pattern established during the first Palestinian uprising against Israel, which lasted from 1987 to 1993. In those years, more than 800 suspected collaborators were slain by fellow Palestinians -- about one-third of the total Palestinian deaths in that intefadeh.

The latest killings -- many of them chillingly gruesome and highly public in nature -- appear calculated to terrorize any Palestinian contemplating cooperation with the Israeli security services. Palestinian militiamen behind the slayings promise their anti-collaborator campaign will intensify.

Collaborators "are very dangerous -- they're more dangerous than the Israelis," said Abu Mujahid, a spokesman for the Al Aqsa Brigades, a Palestinian militia group linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, which claimed responsibility for at least five of the recent killings. "They're the enemy you don't know -- they're within, they're among us."

Militiamen who profess loyalty to the Palestinian leader say their campaign against collaborators was prompted in part by Israeli attacks on Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Last week, Israel staged its biggest offensive yet in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, sending troops and tanks into Palestinian cities, towns and refugee camps.

Israel, which accuses the Palestinian security services of having direct ties to terror attacks against Israelis, has been bombing Palestinian police stations, demolishing intelligence installations and shelling Palestinian checkpoints. Some collaborators were freed from Palestinian custody during last week's Israeli incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas.

"We told (the Palestinian Authority), 'You cannot keep the collaborators, because you haven't got jails," said Abu Mujahid, interviewed by The Associated Press after the Al Aqsa Brigades shot two convicted collaborators Friday night at a slaughterhouse and dumped their bodies. The slain men had escaped from Palestinian prison a week earlier, in the wake of Israeli shelling in the West Bank town of Nablus.

A little over a year ago, Arafat's government cracked down on collaborators, executing two of them by firing squad and sentencing at least seven others to death. But the executions drew an outcry from human rights groups and foreign governments, and none has been carried out since.

"The Palestinian Authority has many considerations in dealing with this, the human rights issue, and because of this they've stopped carrying out verdicts, especially when it's the death penalty," said Abu Mujahid. "But we have only one issue -- our security. So we say, 'If there's someone who's collaborating, bring him to us, and we will do the job.' "

Among Palestinians, even those who believe collaborators should be harshly punished are alarmed by the climate of chaos and lawlessness surrounding this spate of killings.

In the West Bank town of Ramallah, the Palestinians' commercial and administrative center, the blood-streaked body of Raed Naem Odeh, shot for alleged collaboration, was left dangling by the ankles on Tuesday from a monument in the middle of the town's main square. It was the first public display of the body of a suspected collaborator during the fighting.

Judging from recent bloody events, those at greatest risk of summary execution at the hands of militiamen are those Palestinians suspected of having provided information that helped Israel assassinate activist leaders. Israel has acknowledged killing some militants who it says carried out terror attacks.

In the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Thursday, Palestinian militiamen snatched two alleged informers who had been moved from the main prison after Israeli airstrikes last week.

One of them, Mohammed Dakhalla, had been sentenced to death last year by a Palestinian court for helping Israel kill Hussein Abayat, a local militia leader. The other, Mahmoud Sabatin, had been in Palestinian custody on suspicion of helping Israel kill another militia leader, but was never tried

Gunmen shot the two to death before onlookers at the very spot where Abayat was killed in an Israeli missile attack in November 2000. The assailants then dragged Sabatin's body through town behind a pickup truck before trying to dangle it from a building overlooking Manger Square, the traditional birthplace of Christ. Palestinian police prevented the body from being strung up.

In Palestinian society, the stigma against collaborators is powerful, even in death. On Saturday, Dakhalla's family was still trying to get his body returned to them. Local imams, or mosque preachers, have refused to allow him to be buried in any town cemetery.

At the family house in Bethlehem, his 52-year-old mother, Huda, said neighbors told her they had seen the body at a nearby garbage dump. Palestinian police refused to let anyone near the site.

Huda Dakhalla said she doubted her five daughters would be able to marry because of the disgrace to the family. Both she and her husband were fired from their jobs after their son's arrest. The youngest children, she said, are being harassed in school by classmates who taunt them for having a collaborator for a brother.

"He was my oldest son," she said, weeping. "They are criminals, those who killed him. Even if he did the things they accuse him of, did he deserve to die in such a terrible way?"