In a major embarrassment to Israel, Nelson Mandela has agreed to observe the trial of a Palestinian leader formally indicted on Wednesday on charges of murder and terrorism.
A lawyer for Marwan Barghouti, a member of the Palestinian legislative council and secretary general of the Fatah movement in the West Bank, revealed he had been in South Africa last week to invite the former president to the trial.
”He said he was enthusiastic about coming,” Khader Shkirat said. He quoted Mandela as saying: ”What is happening to Barghouti is exactly the same as what happened to me. The government tried to de-legitimise the African National Congress and its armed struggle by putting me on trial.”
Barghouti was arrested in April and is the first senior Palestinian to be put in the dock in the two years of the uprising against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces fired rockets into a house in the West Bank on Wednesday, killing a disabled Hamas military leader as well as another Palestinian. The soldiers then used bulldozers to demolish the house in the village of Tubas near Nablus.
Witnesses later identified the body in the rubble as that of Nasr Jarrar (44), the wheelchair-bound leader of Hamas’s military wing in Jenin.
The Israeli army said Jarrar lost both legs and one arm while preparing a bomb a year ago but despite that was planning an attack on a high-rise building in central Israel using several suicide bombers.
Troops surrounded the house where he was staying and used loudspeakers to order people out. After several people left, tanks opened fire.
Israel has shown no let-up in its policy of assassinating leading militants in recent days in spite of reports that all Palestinian groups, including Hamas, have been discussing whether to order a halt to killings of Israeli civilians inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
Senior sources in the Palestine Authority have said Hamas was insisting that any ”ceasefire” on its side must be matched by Israel halting its killings of militants. — Â