2 Palestinians forced from West Bank

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Israel expelled two Palestinians from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip on Wednesday -- a court-sanctioned step hailed by the military as a powerful deterrent against suicide bombings and condemned by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan as a violation of international law.\nIt marked the first time Israel uprooted relatives of Palestinian terror suspects.\nIntisar and Kifah Ajouri -- brother and sister of an explosives expert who had dispatched two suicide bombers to Tel Aviv -- said they were blindfolded by Israeli troops and driven in two armored vehicles into Palestinian territory.\nTroops used back roads to avoid a large group of journalists waiting at the main crossing into Gaza. The armored vehicles dropped the pair in an orchard -- an area where four Palestinian civilians were killed by army fire last week.\nIntisar Ajouri said that inside the armored vehicle, soldiers asked her to keep her head down. "They drove us for about 20 minutes," she told a news conference in Gaza City. "Suddenly they took us out of the tanks and freed our hands and we found ourselves in the middle of a farm planted with figs and grapes."\n"We walked until we saw a farmer," Intisar Ajouri said. "We asked him where we are. He told us that we are in a very dangerous place where four Palestinians were killed last week. The farmer told us, `hurry, hurry before they (soldiers) shoot you,' " the woman said.\nThe Israeli military said the two had each been given $212 as an "adjustment grant" for their two-year exile in Gaza.\nIsrael's Supreme Court paved the way for the expulsions when it decided in a landmark ruling Tuesday that the military can force relatives of Palestinian terror suspects out of the West Bank, as long as it proves they pose a security threat.\nExpulsion are seen by the Palestinians as severe punishment. Palestinians live in extended families, are deeply rooted in their communities and are much less mobile than people in Western societies.\nHuman rights lawyers say they fear the expulsions are the beginning of a creeping population transfer to Gaza, which is fenced in and much easier for Israel to control. All suicide bombers in the past two years have come from the West Bank, where Palestinians can still reach Israel on back roads despite closures.\nThe court ruled that Intisar and Kifah Ajouri helped their brother, Ali Ajouri, dispatch two suicide bombers to Tel Aviv on July 17. Three foreign workers and two Israelis were killed in the attack. The judges said Intisar sewed the bomb belts and Kifah stood watch as his brother moved explosives between hiding places. Ali Ajouri was killed in an Israeli military strike Aug. 6.\nThe military argued that expulsions create a powerful deterrent, while human rights groups said the court decision validate a practice that amounts to collective punishment and violates international law.\nAnnan accused Israel of violating international law by expelling the two Palestinians.\nPalestinian leader Yasser Arafat denounced the expulsions Wednesday as a "crime against humanity that violates all human and international laws."\nIsraeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said the military might expel additional relatives of terror suspects.\nExpulsions are one of the measures Israeli military is trying out to stem the tide of suicide bomb attacks that has swept over Israel during two years of fighting. More than 250 Israelis have been killed in more than 70 suicide attacks. The last one was Aug. 4.\nIsraeli military commanders say the threat of expulsion, together with the destruction of family homes of bombers, has led to some families stopping Palestinians from carrying out attacks.\nHuman rights lawyers said expulsion violates the Geneva Conventions, which forbid "deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the occupying power or to that of any other country."\nLawyer Leah Tzemel, who represented two of the petitioners, said the court decision might get Israel entangled with the Hague-based International Criminal Court.\nThe Israeli court accepted the state's argument that the West Bank and Gaza constitute one territory, and sending West Bankers to Gaza did not amount to deportation. Israel has never acknowledged that the Geneva Conventions apply to the West Bank and Gaza.\nOn Wednesday morning, the Ajouris were driven in a convoy of jeeps and prison vans from two Israeli prisons to a military base in the West Bank where they bid farewell to relatives. The two were led into the backyard of the base, where soldiers removed their shackles and handcuffs.\nKifah Ajouri embraced his three children, who were crying, said a sister, Amal.\n"It was an emotional meeting because it is so difficult to say good-bye," Amal Ajouri said in a telephone interview. She said the wife and children of Kifah would try to move to Gaza as well.\nAmal Ajouri said her brother, a house painter, and her sister, a pharmacist, would try to adjust to life in Gaza, but Intisar Ajouri later said she had hoped to resist the expulsion. "We consider this deportation to be an attempt by the occupiers to punish anyone who thinks about being free," she said.