JERUSALEM - Israeli police blocked Palestinians from electioneering in Arab East Jerusalem on Tuesday when campaigning began for parliamentary polls, highlighting a dispute that threatens to delay the vote.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Monday the January 25 polls, widely seen as a referendum on his rule after Israel's Gaza pullout last year raised hopes of ending years of conflict, would not take place if Israel barred voting in East Jerusalem.
In Washington, U.S. President George W. Bush's administration said it hoped the poll would be held on schedule and urged Israel to let Palestinians in East Jerusalem vote.
Israel has threatened to bar balloting in East Jerusalem, which it annexed in the 1967 Middle East war in a move not recognized internationally, because of the candidacy of Hamas, a group bent on Israel's destruction.
Jerusalem has been at the heart of the Middle East conflict, and Palestinians want East Jerusalem as capital of a state they hope to build in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Israeli police beat some Palestinian campaigners with clubs and arrested seven, including a local leader of Abbas's Fatah movement.
Police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said those arrested had been questioned for ‘illegal activity by the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem’ before being freed on bail.
KIDNAP SUSPECT HELD
Growing violence in the Gaza Strip has also threatened to delay Palestinian balloting. Gunfire erupted after dark on Tuesday after Palestinian police arrested a suspect in the kidnapping of three British nationals in Gaza.
About 50 gunmen from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Abbas's Fatah movement, fired guns into the air outside a police headquarters in the town of Rafah, demanding the release of the suspect, witnesses said.
More than a dozen gunmen later stormed into three government buildings, then detonated a bomb beneath the Gaza border fence with Egypt, a concrete barrier put up by Israel and now policed by the Palestinians and Egypt. The bomb caused no damage.
The former hostages, human rights worker Kate Burton, 25, and her parents, Hugh and Helen, were freed on Friday after two days in captivity. Their abduction was claimed by a previously unknown group calling itself the Brigades of the Mujahideen-Jerusalem.
Israel, responding to rocket attacks, fired artillery rounds across its frontier with Gaza. Palestinian security sources said some shells landed close to the suburbs of Gaza City, but caused no injury or damage.
In a bid to spur Israel to drop objections to voting in East Jerusalem, a White House spokesman said: ‘We believe that people must have access to the ballot. Arrangements have been made in the past to ensure that those persons can vote and we believe some arrangements should be possible at this time.’
Israel allowed voting in East Jerusalem in the last Palestinian parliamentary elections in 1996 that Hamas boycotted.
The White House said it hoped to ‘see the elections go forward as scheduled.’
Abbas has come under pressure to delay the elections from within his divided Fatah movement that fears losing ground to Hamas, an increasingly popular rival.
He has a big personal stake in ensuring elections happen on time to signal to Western backers he is implementing democratic reforms promised under a U.S.-backed peace ‘road map.’
Hamas's involvement could also help tame the Islamic militant group by bringing it into the political mainstream. Hamas is widely seen as less corrupt than Fatah.
(Additional reporting by Mohammed Assadi in Ramallah, Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and Dan Williams in Jerusalem)