Israel watches bitter parting of unlikely allies

While they hardly justified the "Romeo and Juliet" tag awarded them by parts of the Israeli press, Tali Fahima and Zachariya Zubeidi were certainly unusual friends and comrades. He was a leading Palestinian militant who had long been high on Israel's most wanted list; she was an Israeli former supporter of the right wing Likud party.

They met after Ms Fahima became concerned about discrimination against Palestinians while she was working in a Tel Aviv law office at the height of the intifada in 2002 and was doing humanitarian work in the armed Fatah leader's West Bank home city of Jenin.

But they have recently - and spectacularly - fallen out with the now left-wing Israeli activist accusing the Palestinian nationalist of being a "prostitute" for Israel's domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet and of "manipulation" in pursuit of an Israeli pardon.

In an interview with the mass circulation Yedhiot Ahronot today, Ms Fahima, 32, accused Mr Zubeidi of issuing apparently empty threats to kill her and adds: "His behaviour shames me, it shames the Palestinian resistance and it shames the people who have died.”

For his part, the charismatic former al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade commander in Jenin, also 32, now dismisses the woman who once offered to be his human shield to protect him from Israeli forces seeking to arrest or kill him.

"Not to respond to her is a response,” he said yesterday. “She wants to make a name for herself at the expense of my reputation. Everybody knows who I am and she has no relations with the Palestinian people and interests.”

There is no evidence to support frequent media innuendos that Ms Fahima, a Sephardic Jew who was held for two years in an Israeli jail for her contact with Palestinian activists, was a girlfriend of the married Mr Zubeidi. But their political parting of the ways seems as bitter as if she had been.

Ms Fahima appears partly angry that her one-time comrade - along with other former West Bank Fatah militants - has sought to join the amnesty called by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. In a lengthy interview with The Independent in 2004 at a safe house in the Jenin refugee camp while he was still being hunted by Israeli forces, Mr Zubeidi, who had already been wounded in one arrest attempt, vowed never to surrender and declared: "I'd like to have a settled life but I went too far. I can't go back. It's irreversible for me.”

But earlier this year he told Haaretz: "I got tired. When you lose, what can you do? We, the activists, paid the heavy price... And what is the result? Zero. Simply zero. And when that's the result, you don't want to be a part of it any more." But Mr Zubeidi, whose chequered career includes a spell as a car thief, was also scornful of the Ramallah-based leadership complaining that he had not yet received a promised pardon and saying that "Israeli security" was the Palestinian Authority's "only plan.”

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- The Israeli human rights organization Btselem has called for a halt to "reckless firing" of steel coated bullets by Israeli forces. The call came after a mentally disabled man was severely injured after being shot with such bullets at short range during another demonstration against the military's separation barrier in the West Bank village of Ni'ilin. The military said the man, named as Awwad Sadeq Sror, tried to grab the rifle of a soldier who had come to arrest his brother for his role in an earlier demonstration.