Israel to release 500 Palestinian prisoners

JERUSALEM - Israel approved the release of 500 Palestinian prisoners yesterday in what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called a goodwill gesture to bolster new Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and build mutual trust.

Officials began drawing up a second list of 400 to follow within three months. The prisoner release was one of a package of gestures Mr Sharon said could increase mutual trust between Israel and the Palestinian Authority after last week's ceasefire agreement, which was endorsed on Saturday by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on condition that Israel kept its side of the bargain.

In an attempt to broaden popular support for Mahmoud Abbas, the newly elected President, 25 per cent of prisoners in the first batch belong to the radical militias and 75 per cent to his mainstream Al Fatah.

Israel waived its earlier insistence that only those who had completed two-thirds of their sentence would be eligible for release, but it is still refusing to free any who killed Israelis.

An organisation supporting the 8,000 prisoners protested, however, that the release was inadequate.

"The great majority," its leader, Ramzi Najjar, said, "are prisoners who had almost completed their sentences.

We want women and sick prisoners released, as well as those who have spent many years behind bars."

Mr Sharon has also agreed to allow 56 gunmen expelled to the Gaza Strip to return to their homes on the West Bank. They include 26 who barricaded themselves in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity for a month in 2002.

"We are freezing all proceedings against them as long as they refrain from terrorist activity," officials said.

They added that another 13, who were exiled to Europe after the Bethlehem siege, would be reviewed on a "case-by-case basis."

Later this week Israel is expected to begin restoring five West Bank towns to Palestinian security control. The first will be Jericho, which has been relatively quiet during the four-and-a-half years of intifada violence.

Tulkarem, Qalqiliya, Ramallah and Bethlehem will follow, but Israel is waiting to see how effective the Palestinian forces are before pulling back from hotspots like Nablus, Jenin and Hebron.

On his domestic front, Mr Sharon ordered law-enforcement agencies to crack down on pro-settler extremists threatening ministers and backbench supporters of his plan to evacuate the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank.

Dalia Rabin, whose father Yitzhak was gunned down by a far-right fanatic in 1995, warned yesterday: "If we don't do enough now to stop the deterioration, we will again see the terrible spectacle of a prime minister assassinated."

Meir Sheetrit, the Transport Minister, complained that he had received death threats to himself, his wife and children. But Mr Sheetrit, a defiant Likud dove overseeing the financial aspects of disengagement, said he was not afraid.

Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, an Iraqi-born Labour Party minister, showed cabinet colleagues a letter, which read: "Arab blood is flowing through your veins. You must return to Iraq to defend Sadam Hussein."

Mr Ben-Eliezer, a retired brigadier-general, left Iraq as a teenager in 1950.

- THE INDEPENDENT