Police officer in Gaza accidentally kills himselfWhich brings my 2007 PalArab self-death count to 566.
A Palestinian traffic police officer affiliated to the de facto Palestinian government in the Gaza Strip died on Monday as a result of the misuse of his weapon.
Palestinian police in Gaza issued a statement naming the deceased as twenty-three-year-old Safwat Abu Al-Naja from Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, the 80,000 PalArab policemen are being threatened by PM Fayyad, who says that he will slash their numbers by 30,000 (which still means that there will be some 20,000 more of them than allowed according to a 1995 agreement with Israel.)
Under pressure from the US and EU, PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salaam Fayad recently agreed to reduce the number of policemen in the West Bank by half.Only in the Western-financed welfare state of the PA would the idea of firing people who do nothing be controversial. Of course, if their salaries would be paid by PalArab taxes rather than EU and American handouts, this opinion might change.
Previous attempts by the PA leadership to lay off thousands of policemen were called off for fear of a mutiny inside the Palestinian security services.
According to the new PA plan, all policemen over the age of 45 would be forced into retirement. In addition, thousands of men and women whose names appear on the payroll of the security forces but don't do any work would be fired immediately.