Fatah officials claim portion of documents fabricated

REACTION:SENIOR PALESTINIAN figures condemned the leak by al-Jazeera of documents revealing that the Palestinian Authority was prepared to grant Israel major demands over Jerusalem as the price of a deal.

Fearing accusations that he was concealing concessionist negotiating positions from Arab League partners, President Mahmoud Abbas said: “I don’t know from where al-Jazeera came up with secret [documents]. There is nothing we hide from our brothers, the Arabs.”

He accused al-Jazeera of deliberately mixing up Palestinian and Israeli positions in negotiations over the past decade. “I have seen them . . . present things as Palestinian but they were Israeli. This is, therefore, intentional.”

PLO executive committee member Yasser Abed Rabbo accused Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al- Thani, the emir of Qatar, of orchestrating a campaign against the Palestinian leadership.

He claimed Qatar-based al-Jazeera was altering and falsifying documents and complained that the channel had worked on them for two months without seeking input from the PLO. He said the material had been leaked by a junior member of the Palestinian negotiations support unit and called for an investigation into the authenticity of the documents.

Although Mr Rabbo pledged that the Authority would not target al-Jazeera’s West Bank office or correspondents, 50 supporters of the ruling Fatah movement yesterday attacked the channel’s Ramallah bureau. The fact that so few loyalists took part in the protest suggested that Fatah members are unhappy with positions taken by their leaders.

Chief Palestinian negotiators Ahmed Qureia and Saeb Erekat also claimed portions of the documents were fabricated.

Mr Qureia argued that al-Jazeera was taking part in a campaign of “incitement against the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian leadership”. He denied offering Israel all but one of its settlements in East Jerusalem, arguing that Israel, which regards all of Jerusalem as its undivided capital, had refused to discuss this issue.

Dr Erekat dismissed the first of al-Jazeera’s four programmes, based on some of 1,676 leaked documents, as presenting “distortions and fraud”.

Gaza-based Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the leaks showed the “ugly face” of the Palestinian Authority, which administers Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank. He said the documents revealed the “level of its co-operation with the occupation”.

The documents, dubbed the “Palestinian papers” by al-Jazeera, reveal that Palestinian negotiators were prepared to cede the besieged Palestinian majority East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in exchange for land elsewhere. If the deal had been accepted, this would have cut off Palestinian quarters just outside the walls of the Old City from Palestinian residential suburbs to the north.

Documents also suggested the Authority would accept that negotiations over the Old City’s mosque compound, claimed by Israel as the site of the ancient Jewish temples, would be overseen by a committee comprising the US, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt.

Concessions on Jerusalem are particularly sensitive because it is the third holiest city for Muslims, after Mecca and Medina. Before the 1967 Israeli occupation, it was a site of pilgrimage for Arab Muslims.