debkafile Exclusive: Olmert secretly allows American delivery of 1,000 M16 rifles to be delivered to Abu Mazen’s Force 17, while admitting to only

Israel’s top military and security chiefs are up in arms against prime minister Ehud Olmert and defense minister Amir Peretz after discovering the far-from-token scope of the arms delivery the ministers allowed to reach Abu Mazen’s private army. Before the prime minister left for Europe and during his trip, he stated that 200 automatic rifles had been transferred to Mahmoud Abbas for the use of his private army. He assured Israeli security chiefs that “not a single extra gun” would be permitted. Now they have discovered that, under the table, 1,000 guns and 3 million bullets were delivered to Abbas’ “presidential guard”, Force 17 (a veteran terrorist arm of Fatah with a long history of hundreds of attacks against Israelis.)
debkafile further discloses:
1. The weapons and ammo, both state of the art, come from American military sources. They reached Jordan 10 days ago.
2. The Jordanian army removed the US military emblems stamped on the guns.
3. At midnight, June 12, a convoy of 4 Jordanian military trucks with their markings removed reached the Allenby Bridge crossing into Israel and the West Bank, which was opened especially to let them through.
4. An IDF special forces escort and helicopters secured the convoy’s passage via Jericho to the West Bank Christian village of Taibe northeast of Ramallah. There, Force 17 took delivery of the consignment.
Saturday night, June 17, Hamas too discovered the real scale of the arms delivery to Fatah and furiously demand that the “the American-Israeli plot” against it be investigated. There was no comment from Israel.
To avoid the stigma of being seen as an US-Israeli puppet, Abu Mazen Saturday, June 17, denied taking delivery of the American weapons through Israeli good will. They are now stowed away in the Force 17 arsenal. But Abbas cannot allow them to be distributed to its members without losing face.