A report published Monday by Israeli daily Haaretz said that it was discovered recently, during a trial in an Israeli military court, that Palestinian prisoners had obtained mobile phones to contact their families and speak with detainees in other jails.

The case started a year earlier, according to Haaretz, after phone store owner Nadir Salah was arrested in al-Khader village near Bethlehem, and said that he had bought phone lines from Cellcom and sold them after registering them in his name.

He sold the lines to a third party and paid the bill each month, but in 2008 noticed that the bills on three of the lines were noticeably high and decided to close the lines.

Shortly afterwards, he began receiving calls from Palestinian prisoners asking him to reopen the lines, and decided to capitalize on the arrangement.

He said he met with PA prisoners minister Issa Qaraqe and the pair organized a contract which involved Salah selling access to 50 phone lines to the PA Ministry of Prisoners for 1,850 shekels ($500) per month, of which Salah kept 25 percent.

Salah said that as phones were confiscated by Israeli prison services, the PA would ask him for more lines, which he provided.

Issa Qaraqe said the claims were hypothetical and false.

“It is part of Israeli incitement against Palestinian prisoners. The claims are baseless,” he told Ma’an.

Passengers told Ma’an on Monday that they were making do with cardboard and newspapers to sleep at night, and to avoid the heat of the sun during the day. Some sleep in mosques, and very few can afford to hire a hotel room in el-Arish.

Some passengers managed to cross to Gaza through smuggling tunnels.

“Thank God, I managed to come through tunnels despite the dangers. I had to do that because the situation at the Egyptian side of Rafah crossing is very difficult especially since I have my grandmother with me and she can’t wait there,” said one of the passengers who came through the tunnels.

“There are sick people, children, women and elderly people spending days without basic living requirements.”

A young man who came from the United Arab Emirates says hotel managers in el-Arish raised rates per room from 50 Egyptian pounds ($7) a night to 90 pounds ($12). He highlighted that some of the passengers ran out of money and don’t know what to do.

Nasser al-Najjar, a spokesman for the Red Cross, told Ma’an that 87 Palestinians headed to Nafha prison early in the morning. Israeli authorities allowed 13 children to join the visit.

“This once again brings into question the American role in negotiations as a credible mediator,” Ashrawi said in a statement.

“Rather than providing Israel with immunity, the Obama administration should act responsibly and promote prospects for a just peace and Palestinian self-determination and freedom.”

The senior PLO official said the EU should go further than simply labeling settlement products by enforcing a “serious ban” on their sale.

“The US has used the so-called peace process as an instrument of Israeli impunity; it is about time to end such a policy.”

EU foreign ministers from 27 member states agreed over a year ago to enforce EU legislation and label products originating from illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

On February 22, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton called on EU foreign ministers to enforce legislation on labeling settlement goods and in April, 13 EU foreign ministers expressed support for the initiative, with the issue currently in discussion.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and senior US officials reportedly asked Ashton to delay enforcement of the proposal, with the Americans saying that it would harm Kerry’s efforts to restart peace talks, Israeli daily Haaretz reported.

A senior Israeli official told the Israeli daily that Israel had asked the US administration to intervene to delay the EU’s decision to follow through on labeling settlement products.

The decision to label settlement goods will likely be delayed until June.

“The EU decided to give Kerry the time he asked for and see whether the negotiations are resumed,” a European diplomat said, according to Haaretz.

Egyptian police angered by the kidnapping of seven colleagues by Islamist gunmen kept a crossing into the Gaza Strip closed again on Saturday, stranding hundreds of Palestinian travelers, witnesses said.

The protest began on Friday when police strung barbed wire across the Rafah border post and chained up the gates, local residents said, a day after the abductions.

Gunmen demanding the release of jailed Islamist militants had seized seven policemen and soldiers on a road between the Sinai towns of el-Arish and Rafah.

Three of those abducted had worked at the Rafah border crossing, locals said.

“We will not open the crossing until the kidnapped soldiers are freed and the interior minister arrives to listen to our demands so that these attacks on us are not repeated,” one of the protesting policemen said on Saturday.

Hardline Islamist groups in North Sinai have exploited the collapse of state authority after the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 to launch attacks across the border into Israel and on Egyptian targets.

The protesting policemen called on Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, to help free their colleagues.

Security sources said on Saturday all seven hostages remained missing, retracting their report the previous day that one policeman had been released.

A spokesman for the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement, which runs the Gaza Strip, criticized the Egyptian police action and said contacts were under way to resolve the standoff.

“There are promises to follow up on the matter, but in spite of these promises the suffering is still building up. We consider the continued closure of the crossing unjustified and incomprehensible,” Sami Abu Zuhri told Al Jazeera television.

(Source / 18.05.2013)