A Palestinian \"court\" in Shechem handed down the death penalty today to three Arabs accused of providing information to Israel which facilitated its Tuesday strike against the Hamas headquarters. The trial lasted ten minutes. The three were arrested yesterday, and PA Prosecutor-General Khaled El-Kidwa says that a week of such arrests and trials will follow. Several hours later, a fourth man, 52, was sentenced to death for the same offence. Former MK Atty. Elyakim HaEtzni commented on the PA\'s judicial proceedings: “An enraged mob broke into the Shechem jail and threatened, ‘We’ll kill them on our own if you won\'t do it,’ that is to say, if you won\'t arrange a show trial. And all of this at 3 in the morning. And so they sentenced them to death without a lawyer or anything within ten minutes... Not only the Israeli Left remains silent, the whole world does. There is deep contempt for the Arabs, as well as disdain and racism in this silence. The underlying assumption [in the silence] is that the Arabs are primitive and that you can’t expect better from them. That, too, is offensive.”



According to an AP report, fifty persons demonstrated today against Arafat as he met with Italian government officials in Rome. They called for an end to the PA policy of sentencing collaborators to death.