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Last update - 01:41 05/06/2005
Israel works to prevent PA execution of 50 collaborators
By Yuval Yoaz

Israel has gone to great lengths to prevent the Palestinian Authority from executing approximately 50 Palestinians convicted of collaborating with Israel. Along with its appeal to senior PA officials, Israel approached U.S. Ambassador Dan Kurtzer on the matter, and went ahead with the release of Palestinian security prisoners last Thursday only after the PA said it did not intend to carry out the sentences.

Three months ago, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) authorized the execution of the 50, who had been convicted of aiding Israeli security forces. Shortly thereafter, the head of the PA military tribunals, Saib al-Kidwa, said that 15 of the convicted men would be executed in the following weeks, after their sentences had been vetted by the senior religious authority in the PA, Sheikh Akrima Sabri.

At that point, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's advisor Dov Weissglas approached various PA officials, including PA Prisoner Affairs Minister Sufyan Abu Zaydeh and the chief of PLO negotiations. Livni and Weissglas said Israel would not accept executions for collaboration, whether or not the condemned actually worked with Israel.

At a meeting of the joint commission on prisoners on May 8, Israel told PA officials it would not go ahead with the planned release of 400 security Palestinian prisoners if the PA carried out the executions.

In response to a High Court petition by former prisoner of Zion Ida Nudel that Israel do everything in its power to prevent the executions, the State Prosecutor's Office told the court that Kurtzer had told Sharon the PA said it didn't intend to carry out the sentences.

Nudel's attorney, Nitzana Darshan-Leitner, said an employer-employee relationship existed between the collaborators and Israel and if economic sanctions and a delay in releasing prisoners failed to dissuade the PA from implementing the executions, Israel "should send in its security forces to rescue the collaborators."

Following the prosecutor's statement to the court, Justices Edmond Levi, Elyakim Rubinstein and Esther Hayut rejected the petition. "Even if the concern exists, and it seems the experience of the past does not reassure in this case," Rubinstein wrote, "the proper way to deal with this situation seems to be continuous action of various kinds toward to PA, to ensure everything is being done to prevent the execution."