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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 September 1999 Issue No. 445 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 September 1999 Issue No. 445
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Focus Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Coming down on Hamas
By Khaled AmayrehHamas received a serious and surprising blow in Jordan when plainclothes intelligence officers stormed and closed down the offices of four Amman-based Hamas representatives on Monday. They arrested 15 activists.
In addition, a summons warrant was issued for the four top-ranking Hamas officials in Amman, namely Khaled Misha'al, Ibrahim Ghoshe, Khaled Nazzal and Musa Abu Marzuk, who were not in Amman at the time of the raid. They were reportedly in Tehran taking part in an Islamic meeting.
Misha'al survived a botched assassination attempt by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, in 1997. The late King Hussein intervened personally to save Misha'al's life and traded the two Israeli agents who tried to kill him with the release of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from an Israeli prison.
A Jordanian official said the raids and arrests were carried out because Hamas had no licence. He declined to say if the action was taken under pressure from Israel and the United States, which have often urged the Jordanian government to curb the Islamist movement.
Hamas' reaction to the raids in Amman was privately angry but publicly circumspect. An Islamist spokesman in Amman accused the Jordanian government of "fulfilling the Israeli, American and Palestinian Authority [PA] wishes of seeing Hamas' voice in Jordan silenced".
The Hamas representative in Ramallah, Hassan Youssef, said: "There is no justification for the Jordanian action." Hamas, he said, does not interfere in the internal affairs of Jordan, adding that the closure of the offices would not serve the interests of the Arab nation.
"This will have some impact on leaders and political activists in Jordan, but the base of Hamas lies inside the homeland," he said.
In the West Bank, the Israeli occupation army has stepped up the detention of Islamist activists in the last few weeks. Palestinian sources close to Hamas reported that over 300 Islamic activists and sympathisers had been arrested by the Israeli army and Shin Beth agents during the last two months.
Most of the arrests took place in the Bethlehem and Hebron regions, but other arrests were also reported in the northern part of the West Bank.
Israeli sources described the arrests as "precautionary", in advance of the possible redeployment of Israeli occupation troops in significant parts of the Palestinian countryside (where most of the arrests took place) as well as a sizable chunk of the exclusively Israeli-controlled area "C".
For its part, PA police arrested dozens of Hamas activists in the West Bank. The arrests took place in areas "A" and "B", where the PA has exclusive and partial control respectively. These arrests were also described as "precautionary", suggesting that they were linked to the expected implementation of the Wye agreement. The arrests of Islamist activists in the West Bank followed the incarceration of a number of Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip, including senior Hamas spokesman Abdel-Aziz Al-Rantisi.
Al-Rantisi, who had been interned for 16 months, was briefly released in early July to attend his mother's funeral. However, he was rearrested three weeks later allegedly for making "mendacious statements to the media". Al-Rantisi had told several Arabic-language newspapers, as well as a Gulf-based satellite television station, that "my illegal imprisonment was ordered by Israel and the CIA and all the PA did was to carry out the order."
He also charged that the PA was "answerable to the Zionist regime and the White House more than it was to the Palestinian people".
The truculent remarks reportedly angered PA President Yasser Arafat, who ordered him rearrested along with a number of top Hamas leaders, including Ahmed Nimer, a prominent Friday-prayer speaker who often strongly criticised security coordination between the PA and Israel.
