Israel re-opens notorious desert camp

Israel has reopened a desert detention camp to hold some of the thousands of Palestinians it has rounded up during its 19-day sweep through the West Bank.

Ketziot is a tent camp in a remote part of southern Israel’s Negev desert, a few miles from the Egyptian border.

The camp is known to Palestinians as ‘‘Ansar II’’ after the grim Ansar prison run by Israel during its military occupation of south Lebanon.

Ketziot was first used to detain Palestinians shortly after the previous uprising broke out in December 1987.

At one time, 3,500 prisoners were held there in conditions they described as searing heat by day and bone-chilling cold by night. The last recorded Ketziot prisoners were released in 1996 as part of Israeli-Palestinian peace accords.

In house-to-house searches that have accompanied military incursions into the West Bank since March 29, the Israeli military says it captured many suspected leaders of the Palestinian uprising.

The latest, caught in the town of Ramallah on Monday, was political and militia leader Marwan Barghouti, the highest-ranking activist in Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.

The Israeli military said that as of yesterday morning, it had arrested 4,258 Palestinians in Operation Defensive Shield. Of those, 387 were previously known terror suspects, the army said.

Suspicions against others emerged during interrogation and altogether about 1,200 men would be kept in custody, Israeli security sources said.