Court Orders Militant Freed; Palestinian Leaders Balk
Late tonight, a statement issued on behalf of what was described as the Palestinian leadership said that while the leaders respected the court decision on Mr. Saadat, they would not carry it out in the current conditions, because "the spokesman for Sharon threatened to execute him."

A member of the Palestinian leadership said the leaders intended to keep Mr. Saadat in jail because "we are concerned about his safety."

The P.F.L.P. claimed responsibility for the killing of Mr. Zeevi, a far-right leader. The group said it was in retaliation for the assassination of Mr. Saadat's predecessor, Abu Ali Mustapha, who was killed by a rocket through his office window.

The Palestinian Authority's high court, sitting in Gaza, ordered the release of Mr. Saadat, one of six Palestinians who are under the watch of American and British monitors in a Palestinian prison in Jericho, under the agreement brokered by American and other international officials that freed Mr. Arafat from his compound in Ramallah after a five-week Israeli siege. There was, the court said, no evidence against Mr. Saadat, who was never formally charged with the crime.

Besides Mr. Saadat, four of the other prisoners in Jericho are P.F.L.P militants who were hastily convicted in an impromptu Palestinian court in Mr. Arafat's besieged compound for the shooting of the tourism minister. The fifth is Fuad Shobaki, a top Palestinian financial official implicated in the shipment of 50 tons of weapons aboard the freighter Karine A that was intercepted by Israel in January.

In Nablus, Israeli troops were in the fourth day of what seemed a second reoccupation, searching houses and shops for fugitives and bomb factories. Swaths of Arab land were confiscated by the army throughout the West Bank for protective barriers and fences. With the new fences, as with the ditch in Bethlehem at least five feet wide and deep topped with a pyramid of barbed wire, Israelis said they were "wrapping Jerusalem."

[Early on Tuesday, Israeli tanks and troops entered the West Bank city of Jenin and then withdrew about an hour later, Reuters reported, citing Palestinian officials and the Israeli military. The Israelis said the move was based on reports of the whereabouts of militants that turned out to be incorrect.]

On a ridgeline today in the southeastern part of Jerusalem conquered by Israel in 1967, a backhoe that had been digging through the night was giving way to the construction of fences. They will protect a multimillion-dollar Jewish development of hundreds of homes and a luxury hotel, which will sit on top of the old Arab village of Jabel Mukaber.

The sudden onset of construction — a neighborhood to Jews, a settlement to Arabs — touched two sensitive nerves. It continued both the expansion after 1967 of Jewish areas of Jerusalem into what had been Arab villages, making any final settlement of the dispute over Jerusalem more complex, as well as the overall expansion of Jewish settlements. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, the settler population (not including East Jerusalem) right after the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993 was about 100,000. At the end of 2000 it was more than 190,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/international/middleeast/04MIDE.html