Abu Foul may well be innocent in the attack, which targeted embassy officials heading to interview Palestinians for academic grants. But the fact that he once belonged to Palestinian security and that his group includes a number of former security men has investigators wondering if the bombers didn’t get help from inside the Palestinian police. U.S. officials said last week they had no doubt militants were deliberately targeting the American diplomats, and that they probably had precise information about their route and travel schedule. Those details were shared in advance with Palestinian police, who escorted the convoy into Gaza. And though Preventive Security–the most highly regarded of several law-enforcement agencies in the Gaza Strip–has rounded up a handful of suspects, a senior Western source said last week the other agencies were not cooperating in the investigation.
If the line is blurring between the Palestinian security agencies and the militant groups fighting occupation, Israel says that’s no surprise. “Many of these people have been policemen by day and terrorists by night,” said an Israeli military official, citing specific attacks on Israelis carried out by members of Palestinian security. The perceived link is one of the reasons Israel and Washington have pushed for the security agencies to be overhauled. They’d like all security forces to be put under the authority of an empowered prime minister–a step Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat has fiercely resisted.
Unlike militants in other Arab countries, Palestinians have gone out of their way to make Americans feel safe in the West Bank and Gaza during the last three years of fighting. And in the contorted logic of anger and desperation that guides life in Gaza, even many Palestinians who protected Abu Foul don’t support attacks on Americans. “When we heard about [the bombing], we felt this is a catastrophe,” said Shrafi, the Jabalya resident who saw Abu Foul spirited away. “Americans are welcome here. I invite them to eat and sleep with us in our homes.” Shrafi himself works as a policeman, and his partner on the force was killed last year by Israeli soldiers. On the wall of a shop where he speaks to guests, Shrafi points to a picture of his former colleague holding a machine gun and wearing ammunition belts across his chest–the trademarks of a militant. “He was a policeman but he also was a fighter,” Shrafi explains. If the same is true for the men who blew up the U.S. convoy last week, Palestinian officials will have a lot of explaining to do.
