PA hits back at Al Jazeera revelations

Palestinian officials have accused Al Jazeera television and its Qatari financiers of political motives in releasing hundreds of secret documents allegedly exposing the Palestinian Authority’s dealings with Israel.

Reuters

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior aide to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, made the charges at a lengthy press conference in Ramallah, on Monday morning.

He lashed the TV channel for alleged bias and went on to question the motives of the Emir of Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based.

The revelations, which also appeared in the UK-based Guardian newspaper, helped Israel, he claimed.

If they prove to be true, these leaks will be a serious embarrassment to Abbas’s Fatah movement, which controls the authority and has been locked in dispute with the Hamas movement, since the Islamist movement won control of Gaza in 2007.

The most potentially explosive claims are:

• Palestinian negotiators were ready to cede a large section of occupied east Jerusalem in peace talks with Israel;
• Israel gave the authority advance warning of its 2008 offensive on Gaza;
• Palestinian representative Saeb Erakat offered to accept the return of only 100,000 refugees out of the five million Palestinian refugees – those who fled when Israel was established and their descendants.

Erakat slammed the claims as “distortion and fraud”, while Abbas told Egyptian journalists that the authority has “hidden nothing from our Arab brothers”.

The documents are the first of 1,600 secret files relating to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations since 1999.

Hamas declared that the leaks show the “ugly face” of the authority.

They show “the Fatah authority’s involvement in attempts to liquidate the Palestinian cause”, Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri told the AFP news agency.