Cooperation with Palestinian Authority behind return of abducted Israeli body
Israel's leadership, the Palestinian Authority, the Americans, the UN and even Islamic Jihad contributed to the return to Israel of a body abducted in a West Bank hospital.
TEL AVIV — Armed Palestinians stormed a hospital in the West Bank town of Jenin Nov. 22 and kidnapped an Israeli teenager on life support following a traffic accident in the area. The abduction in Jenin, a hotbed of Israeli-Palestinian clashes in recent months, nearly deteriorated into what one unnamed senior military official described as a “blood bath” and a full-scale Palestinian uprising (intifada).
The gunmen who kidnapped Tiran Fero, 18, a member of Israel’s Druze community, came to their senses in the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 24, after receiving an Israeli ultimatum that unless the body was returned troops would storm the town, and revealed the location of the body. Palestinian mediators rushed to the site, loaded the body into a Red Crescent ambulance and drove it to the Jenin offices of the Palestinian intelligence service, from where it was taken to the Salem crossing between the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel. There it was handed over to Israel’s military coordinator with the PA, Maj. Gen. Ghasan Alyan, himself a member of Israel’s 150,000-member Druze community. The body’s return elicited a huge sigh of relief. The blood bath had been postponed, for now.
