Oct. 20, 2002
Arafat asked to authorize execution of 'collaborator'
By KHALED ABU TOAMEHPalestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat was asked last night to authorize the execution of a Palestinian who confessed that he had helped Israel assassinate a number of Hamas activists in the Gaza Strip.
On Friday a "state security court" in Gaza sentenced the man, Walid Hamdiyeh, 39, to death by firing squad after he reportedly confessed to all the charges against him.
PA prosecutor Khaled al Kidreh said he had sent the court's verdict to Arafat for approval. "Once the president signs it, the security forces would be able to carry out the death sentence in a short period of time," he explained, describing Hamdiyeh as one of the most dangerous collaborators ever to be caught by the PA. He predicted that Arafat would endorse the execution very soon.
Another Hamas activist, Amin Khalafallah, 31, was sentenced to death Saturday by the same security court. Khalafallah, a former student at the Islamic University in Gaza, was found guilty of collaboration with Israel. The court was told that Khalafallah, a resident of Khan Yunis, also worked for the PA's Preventive Security Service in the Gaza Strip. The defendant said he agreed to work for Israel because he wanted money to pay his accumulating debts. He told the judges that he now wanted the death sentence.
Palestinian sources said the PA is seeking to get rid of a large number of suspected collaborators ahead of an Israeli military invasion of the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians fear that the IDF will try to release the suspects from prison, as they say it has done in the West Bank since the beginning of Operation Defensive Shield. Some 200 Palestinians accused of collaboration with Israel are being held in PA prisons in the Gaza Strip.
The PA's General Intelligence Service arrested Hamdiyeh in 1995 on suspicion of collaboration with Israel. A resident of the Shajaiyeh neighborhood in Gaza, Hamdiyeh was one of 400 Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists deported by Israel to southern Lebanon in 1992 following a wave of terror attacks.
The trial began on Thursday evening and ended just after midnight, when one of the judges, Abdel Aziz Wadi, read out the verdict. Hamdiyeh, a former top Hamas operative, was convicted of helping Israeli security forces kill five wanted men: Mohammed Qandil, Yasser Hasanat, Marwan al Zayegh, Yasser al Namruti, and Imad Aqel. The five all members of the armed wing of Hamas were killed by the IDF between 1987 and 1993. He was also convicted of following the movements of many Hamas leaders on behalf of Israel.
Prosecutor Wael Zakuot told the three judges, who are serving police officers, that Hamdiyeh had confessed to all the charges against him from the first day he was arrested. He said four of the Hamas activists were killed when their booby-trapped rifles exploded. Hamdiyeh supplied them with the weapons on the instructions of the Shin Bet, he claimed.
The fifth victim, Imad Aqel, a senior member of the Izzadin Kassam Brigades, Hamas's military wing, was killed by an undercover IDF unit in Gaza on November 4, 1993. Hamdiyeh is reported to have informed the IDF through a tiny communications device that Aqel was staying at a friend's house in Shajaiyeh neighborhood. The prosecutor claimed that the wireless was hidden in a button on trousers given to Hamdiyeh by the Shin Bet.
The defendant told the court that though he was guilty of some of the charges against him, "I didn't do most of the things described in these documents." Muhammad Sabah of the General Intelligence told the judges that Hamdiyeh, who was also a senior preacher and Islamic scholar, was first arrested because of "immoral practices," explaining that he had confessed to being a homosexual.
Tel Aviv lawyer Nitsana Darshan-Leitner said, "The sudden tribunal and death sentence is a desperate bid by Yasser Arafat to calm tension between Hamas and the Palestinian police" following the assassination by Hamas gunmen of Colonel Rajeh Abu Lihyeh, a senior Palestinian police official in Gaza.
She said: "After seven years of allowing Hamdiya to languish in his cell without any legal proceeding, Arafat now finds it politically necessary to offer him up as a blood sacrifice to Sheik Yassin. The rising tensions between Hamas and Fatah are sealing the fate of all those Palestinians imprisoned in the PA on suspicions of having collaborated with Israel."