Apr 10, 2008, 9:52 GMT
Nablus, northern West Bank - The gunmen appeared out of nowhere while we were interviewing the old man in his small, dark living room.
Taking up position outside his house, they demanded to know what the two foreign journalists were doing in Balata, the largest refugee camp on the West Bank, where some 24,000 Palestinians live in multiple-storey brick buildings crammed on less than a square kilometre.
'There is a problem with some of the gunmen. We are just going outside to talk to them,' our Palestinian stringer would only say. A phone call to our local guide, an activist in the camp's community and youth centre, had prompted the two of them to get up abruptly and leave the room.
Despite high-profile efforts by President Mahmoud Abbas and his acting Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to impose law and order in the Palestinian autonomous areas, some parts of the West Bank continue to be controlled by local gunmen, who seem to have little respect for the Palestinian authorities or their security forces.
It was our bad luck to be in one such fiefdom when they were especially nervous. The gunmen of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Abbas' Fatah party, are the only two left in Balata. Their comrades have either been arrested, surrendered, or were killed by the Israeli military. The two are constantly on the run, hiding from both the Israeli army, which searches for them in almost nightly arrest raids, and from the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Their nerves taut, they were angry that our local hosts had allowed foreigners into the camp. Who could guarantee we were indeed journalists? Perhaps we were undercover soldiers, trying to obtain information by photographing the camp's narrow allies and its inhabitants, including possibly some of those wanted by Israel.
Left alone with the old refugee - who reassured us in reasonably fluent English that we were his guests and he would come to our aid if we ran into trouble - we continued to interview him, outwardly relaxed but inside feeling that slight tension that comes from knowing something is amiss, but not knowing exactly what.
It seemed like quite a while before our colleague and the camp resident who had volunteered to show us around came back. While our volunteer seemed nervous, our stringer was calm. Finish your questions, he told us, but wrap up the interview and 'let's get out of here as quickly as possible.'
Only later did they tell us that the two gunmen had threatened to hold us hostage in the old man's house.
A local community leader had intervened and the three of them had managed to calm the gunmen down: They agreed to let us finish our work, after being assured that if it were our cameras they had a problem with, they could inspect them and delete whichever pictures they feared posed a security risk.
But as we walked quickly back from the man's house to the community centre, the two al-Aqsa militants, their Kalashnikov assault rifles slung over their shoulders, suddenly popped out from an ally and blocked our way. They demanded to check our bags and that we hand over our cameras. Holding them, they disappeared as quickly as they had appeared.
We were then holed up for more than five hours at the youth centre, as our hosts and a number of officials took turns negotiating with the gunmen, in person, or over the telephone, trying to get our cameras back.
To no avail. We were forced to leave without the cameras long after sundown. The gunmen, our hosts explained, were furious with them and even threatened to beat up the volunteer who guided us. Our hosts, they said, had broken a written agreement signed by all Palestinian organizations active in the camp, which states that foreigners are banned from entering, unless their arrival is coordinated beforehand with the militants running Balata.
The refugee camp is part of Nablus, the largest city in the northern West Bank, where a pilot project launched late last year by the Fayyad government was to have shown that the Palestinians were able to take charge of security affairs.
Tuesday's incident illustrated how militants still call the shots in the camp.
As part of the security efforts overseen by US General Keith Dayton, some 300 Western-trained special forces deployed in Nablus in early November, charged with restoring law and order. The European Union has also equipped and trained the Palestinian civil police in Nablus to help them fight crime.
Abbas has enrolled many of the city's Fatah militants in an amnesty programme, as part of which Israel has agreed to scratch them off its 'wanted' list, if they hand over their weapons, sign a form committing them to refrain from future attacks against Israel, and agree to incarcerate themselves voluntarily in Nablus's Jneid prison for a three-month trial period.
Most of the Fatah militants in Nablus have signed up, but on a number of occasions, groups have broken out of the PA facility, protesting the prison's and amnesty conditions.
The Nablus pilot project is crucial for the revived negotiations with Israel, which has vowed it will not agree to the establishment of a lawless Palestinian state that has no control over militants.
Jose Vericat, the spokesman for the EU police mission to the Palestinian territories, said that while the Nablus project 'wasn't perfect,' 'everyone involved, including the citizens, saw it as generally successful.'
But, he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, 'I guess there are still plenty of things to be done.'
By Thursday morning, after almost two days of negotiations, we received word our cameras were handed over to the Nablus governor.
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