Palestinian officials expressed relief at the outcome of the latest visit to Washington by Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian Minister of Internal Security, Mohammad Dahlan. According to Minister Dahlan, the US Administration, though did not accept the Palestinian stand on the question of prisoners release from Israeli jails, has accepted to a certain point the Palestinian stand on the defense wall that Israel is building in the West Bank and on the Jewish settlements. The US, said Dahlan, has pledged to take a few steps to make sure that those issues of contention are to be solved and for this purpose a joint American – Palestinian committee was formed to monitor developments on the ground. Members of the committee are John Wolf and Saeb Erekat.

In a special session of the Palestinian Legislative Council’s members in the Gaza Strip this Thursday, Palestinian Minister of Internal Security, Mohammad Dahlan, said that the Palestinian delegation to Washington managed to obtain a certain degree of understanding by the US Administration of the Palestinian position vis-à-vis the question of disarming Palestinian factions.

“At first, we had a problem explaining our stand but then we felt that the US was not as supportive as it was in the beginning to the Israeli stand when it came to demands of the PNA to disarm the Palestinian factions,” said Dahlan. He added that the Palestinian team created a new understanding of the form and kind of Palestinian responsibilities with regard to maintaining the truce and the ceasefire for a time and not to fall in the trap of a civil war that Israel has been trying to push the Palestinians into it. “We made it clear in Washington that our duty is to maintain law and order and to collect all kinds of illegal weapons so that ultimately only the Palestinian security forces would be allowed to carry weapons. With this clear stand, we made sure that ultimately the PNA will be the sole body in charge without having to go into a civil war under the banner of fighting the so-called terrorism,” said Dahlan.

The minister, who is also in charge of the interior ministry, said that the tone of US official statements has changed towards the end of the visit to Washington in a positive way and that Washington has finally been open to listen to the Palestinian viewpoint after somehow severed relations for close to 33 months. “We managed in bringing our voice loud in Washington and had the chance to address a cluster of issues of great importance for us before the US Administration. We put those issues directly on the desk of President George Bush, as opposed to the past three years which we spent trying to establish whatever contact we could with the US Administration through third parties, mainly Arab countries,” said Dahlan.

Dahlan addressed only the PLC members in Gaza as those in the West Bank did not attend because of the current restrictions imposed by Israel on movement of PLC members between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. He argued that because of the reconciliation offensive of the Palestinian leadership on the political front, Israel has been pushed into an embarrassing situation with regard to the peace process.

PLC members who attended the meeting raised many questions about a number of issues that, they said, were of utmost importance for the Palestinian people. Marwan Kanafani, head of the political committee in the PLC, said that such encounters between the minister and council members should be repeated on regular basis for both sides to hear updates and to evaluate jointly the progress on the ground. He said that a certain mechanism of contact between the Palestinian population and the ministry should be endorsed in order to facilitate for whoever has any complaint to lodge his or her issue without any fear or delay.

The PLC agreed that another meeting with Dahlan should take place in two weeks from now and recommended that similar meetings be held with commanders of various police forces as well.

Answering questions on the re-structuring of the Palestinian security forces in the PNA, Dahlan said that the preventive security had been unified both in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank under the command of Rashid Abu Sh’bak, former deputy head of the Gaza Preventive Security when Dahlan was its commander until approximately more than a year ago.

The Palestinian police force, said Dahlan, had been furnished with 150 new vehicles, 40 of which sent to the West Bank, and that work is being done to double the monthly budget of the police force from its current budget of a bit over one million dollars. Dahlan said that a grand project of computerizing the police force has been started at a cost of $ 22 m. while command and operations centers are being built at a cost of $ 25 m. He noted that the police forces need at least $250 m. to rehabilitate their headquarters and to re-structure themselves over a period of three years. “We are trying to raise these funds from the donor countries,” he said.

Other types of reforms within the police force, said Dahlan, include building extra floors for the central prison in Gaza, which is overcrowded these days with criminals and common law offenders, mainly people charged and convicted of drug dealing and other kinds of criminal acts. He added that his ministry would soon start the unification progress between the civil defense forces and the passport departments in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Most of the PLC members who spoke in the meeting said their main concern was the mounting degree of drug dealing and consumption in the Gaza Strip and demanded that the Palestinian security forces fight these phenomena without any delay. Other issues that concern them, they said, included car thefts, drug growing mainly in the Khan Younis area and presence of a cluster of roadblocks by a number of Palestinian security forces within the Gaza Strip. The members insisted that all Palestinian security forces should work directly under the interior ministry in order to prevent this situation of duplicated encounter with the population.