Last update - 00:00 31/10/2007
Israeli, Palestinian police forces hold first ever joint workshop
By The Associated Press
Israeli and Palestinian police officers held their first ever joint workshop on Wednesday, with officers from both forces discussing accident prevention and building mutual confidence, one day after Israeli jets struck a Hamas police station in Gaza, killing four.
The one-day seminar on road safety, sponsored by the European Union, was held in a countryside hotel just inside Israel's border with the West Bank, in Neve Ilan on the hills outside Jerusalem.
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenberg said that while the two forces had for many years cooperated in matters such as locating missing persons or extricating Israelis who had wandered into Palestinian territory, Wednesday's workshop was the first time that officers from both sides shared a classroom.
Rosenberg voiced hope that this would be only the beginning. "This is the first of the cooperation that's taking place," he said. "We're planning another workshop in the near future in the field of forensics, which is also a field that we feel we can develop with the Palestinian police."
Abdul-Salaam Ismail, adviser to the head of the Palestinian police, said working with Israeli counterparts was vital.
"We're not just interested in traffic issues," he told a news conference at the workshop site. "We're also interested in all police issues, and we hope to continue with other future activities of this sort in cooperation with the Israeli police."
The Israelis made presentations on the use of radar, alcohol-level detectors and cameras, which the Palestinians said they lacked and were seeking to get from the EU, which since 2005 has operated a mission to help them train, equip and organize Palestinian police.
Though they were part of peacemaking efforts in the 1990s, joint police patrols on West Bank roads are not feasible in the near future, Israeli officers said, as current agreements strictly delineate areas of Palestinian and Israel jurisdiction, and there are only a few roads shared by Israeli and Palestinian motorists.
Israeli rights group B'tselem says that at present 312 kilometers of highway inside the West Bank is either reserved exclusively for the use of Israelis or subject to limited access by Palestinians.
Professional contacts between Israeli and Palestinian officers have traditionally been conducted out of the public eye, and Wednesday's high-profile event came as Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was seeking to consolidate his authority in the West Bank, where his Western-leaning government has its base after being violently driven out of the Gaza Strip by the militant Islamic Hamas in June.
Israel has declared the coastal strip a hostile entity and has no dealings with its Hamas rulers, so all the Palestinian officers at Neve Ilan were Abbas loyalists from the West Bank.
Hamas has its own uniformed security force in Gaza, and four of those men were killed in Tuesday night's airstrike in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.
The Israeli military described the police station as a post of Hamas terrorists and said it was targeted in response to mortar fire into Israel earlier in the day.
In the West Bank, Abbas is busy reforming his police and security forces in an effort to keep Islamic militants on the defensive and reassure Israel and the U.S. that he is strong enough to carry out a peace deal, especially in the run-up to a U.S.-hosted Mideast conference later this year.
The international community has been urging Israel and the Palestinians to build mutual confidence and show signs of goodwill ahead of the conference, in Annapolis, Maryland, but officers at Wednesday's gathering would not comment on the political backdrop to their meeting.
The head of the EU police mission, Britain's Colin Smith, said the workshop was decided upon several months ago and its immediate objective was professional dialogue.
"To me what is important is that they are actually making those contacts, they're getting that ability to communicate with each other, so it's the actual effects today which as a police officer are more important than how it will be interpreted," he said. "But it is highly visible and it does show that police officers from different traditions can get together."
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