Palestinians Security

Soon after Monsour Shawa was appointed mayor of Gaza City, a friend called to congratulate him and recommend a first order of business: Buy a gun. "He offered to sell me one--a 9-millimeter automatic," said the prominent Gaza businessman. "I said, 'What's the price?' When he told me, I said, 'No thank you, I'll take my chances.' " The price: $3,500.

An Israeli man was killed and three others wounded Sunday when a Palestinian security officer opened fire on a convoy of ultra-Orthodox Jewish worshippers who had entered a religious site in a Palestinian-administered area without permission and then ignored orders to stop, Israeli and Palestinian officials said. The Jewish worshippers were attempting to make an unauthorized predawn pilgrimage to Joseph's Tomb, located in the West Bank city of Nablus. The incident threatened to further heighten tensions in the West Bank between Jewish settlers and Palestinians.

Just hours before this area exploded in celebration of Israel officially ending 27 years of military occupation, an Israeli colonel and his Palestinian counterpart stood in the darkness early Wednesday discussing the last-minute logistics of the historic transfer of power. Suddenly, the Israeli stopped in mid-sentence. He looked up at Col.

Recent Palestinian attacks on West Bank settlers, which are likely to increase in response to relaunched peace talks, pose one of the biggest challenges yet to U.S.-trained Palestinian security forces and their uneasy alliance with the Israeli military. The militant group Hamas killed four Israeli settlers and wounded two others in shooting attacks this week as Palestinian and Israeli leaders were starting their first direct negotiations in nearly two years. With the talks already hanging by a thread, an uptick in violence is the last thing the Palestinian Authority wanted to see, particularly because it could strengthen Israel's hand in negotiations.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Thursday asked Pope John Paul II to help win peace in the Middle East, but Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman, told a papal envoy that the talks could not resume without international protection for Palestinians. About the same time Rabin met the Pope here Thursday morning, Arafat spoke with Archbishop Jean Louis Tauran, the Vatican's foreign minister, at PLO headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia.

Mouawiyah Masri, a Palestinian lawmaker who was shot and wounded in an assault by three masked men after signing an anti-corruption manifesto, said that at least one of the attackers is a member of the Palestinian security forces. Masri, 55, said he believes that he was attacked Wednesday because the declaration holds Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat directly responsible for rampant corruption in the government. The head of the Nablus police, Col.

Police claimed that a high-ranking Palestinian security official was behind the killings of two Palestinians suspected of selling land to Jews. "We have firsthand evidence of the involvement of a head of security in the Palestinian Authority," Jerusalem Police Cmdr. Yair Yitzhaki told reporters. He refused to give the official's name.

As the highest-ranking commander of nearly 8,000 Palestinian security troops, Maj. Gen. Diab Ali is accustomed to being top gun. But the salutes often stop when he leaves the military base and travels through the West Bank. Experience has taught the general to leave his gun behind and trade the uniform for civilian clothes, lest some young Israeli checkpoint guard decide to hold him for questioning or block his way. "It avoids problems," said Ali, commander of the National Security Forces of the Palestinian Authority.

Israeli forces fired on Palestinian security buildings in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and three Palestinians were killed Saturday in two other shooting incidents. Early today, Israeli tanks began shelling security positions in the West Bank city of Ramallah. There was no word on casualties.

A commander who has quarreled with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat may be tapped to head all of the Palestinian security forces as incoming Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas starts to assemble his Cabinet, officials say. Palestinian sources speaking on condition of anonymity said Abbas met with Mohammed Dahlan, former Gaza Strip security chief, and is considering naming him interior minister.

As the highest-ranking commander of nearly 8,000 Palestinian security troops, Maj. Gen. Diab Ali is accustomed to being top gun. But the salutes often stop when he leaves the military base and travels through the West Bank. Experience has taught the general to leave his gun behind and trade the uniform for civilian clothes, lest some young Israeli checkpoint guard decide to hold him for questioning or block his way. "It avoids problems," said Ali, commander of the National Security Forces of the Palestinian Authority.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, on Wednesday expressed sympathy for the deepening suffering of Palestinians, but signaled that her efforts toward Mideast peace now focus on a handful of narrow issues. Rice said at a news conference that she hoped to reach agreements to open restricted border crossings, provide new humanitarian aid and improve the weak and fractured Palestinian security agencies.

In a new outbreak of unrest in the Gaza Strip, thousands of unpaid members of the Palestinian police force staged a noisy protest Thursday outside the parliament building, firing guns in the air, hurling stones and denouncing the Hamas-run government. Later, a Palestinian security officer was killed in an ambush-style shooting in Gaza City, and gunfights between rival factions elsewhere in the seaside territory left at least seven people injured.

Trucks carrying food rolled into Gaza on Thursday after Israel reopened the strip's main commercial crossing, which it had closed for more than two weeks because of what it said were security threats. The United Nations warned last week that stocks of wheat, sugar and cooking oil were dwindling in Gaza and could begin to run out within days unless Israel reopened the Karni crossing.

For the second night in a row, Israel on Friday staged a deadly missile strike against Palestinian militants in the northern Gaza Strip. Majid Matat, a field operative for the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, was killed when two missiles fired by Israeli aircraft incinerated his white Subaru just after dusk near the town of Beit Hanoun, Palestinian officials and witnesses said. Two of his comrades escaped.

At least three people were killed and about 50 injured in the Gaza Strip during clashes Sunday between Palestinian security forces and Hamas militants, Palestinian officials said. The confrontations, which broke out after dark in two neighborhoods near Gaza City, left a Palestinian police officer and two civilian bystanders dead, Palestinian medical officials said.

Yasser Arafat fired the powerful head of his West Bank Preventive Security Services on Thursday, ending days of speculation over Jibril Rajoub's fate, but not before exposing growing fissures inside the senior ranks of Palestinian leadership. Both Rajoub and Gaza Strip-based Police Chief Ghazi Jabali were, until recently, pillars of the regime they served. But Arab media reported this week that the Palestinian Authority president had decided to fire both men.

Israeli military commanders escorted Palestinian security officials on a tour of demolished Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip on Monday in preparation for the hand-over of settlement land later this month. The tour, a rare direct encounter between senior military officials from the two sides, provided the Palestinian delegation with a first glimpse of the settlements since Israel evacuated about 8,500 settlers last month.

The Palestinian Authority has put out a call to hire 5,000 new security officers to secure the Gaza Strip as Israel completes its planned evacuation this summer, an Interior Ministry spokesman said Saturday. Although there are fears that Palestinian militants will fire on Israeli targets during and after the pullout, the new recruits won't be armed because of Israeli restrictions on the number of guns Palestinian security forces can carry, said the spokesman, Tawfiq abu Khousa.