Militants Accuse Plo Of Conspiring Against Islam Crackdown In Wake Of Bombings Divides Palestine
Muslim militants accused the PLO on Thursday of conspiring with Israel to “wage war against Islam,” while divisions arose among the Palestinian police over how hard to crack down on the radicals.
To prevent more attacks, Israel said it was banning all Palestinians, even those with work permits, from entering during the week-long Passover holiday, which begins Friday.
The pace of Yasser Arafat’s operation against militants in the PLO-run Gaza Strip slowed on Thursday, with police making only six arrests.
Nearly 200 supporters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been detained since the fundamentalist groups claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings in Gaza Sunday that killed seven Israelis and an American student.
But most have been released and none of those jailed were from the groups’ underground military wings, which have attacked Israelis in an effort to halt Israel-PLO peacemaking.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said it was too early to judge whether Arafat was carrying out his promise to disarm the militants. “The test isn’t in one or two days,” he said.
Senior Palestinian police officers, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the latest crackdown as merely a show of force by Arafat, the PLO chief.
One senior officer said Arafat had overruled his own police chief, Maj. Gen. Nasr Youssef, who wanted a harsher crackdown on hard-core activists. He said divisions were growing between Arafat and his senior commanders in the Palestinian police, a paramilitary force that helps ensure Arafat’s grip on power.
The commanders were former guerrillas who came to Gaza from other Arab countries, the officer said, while the bulk of the force was recruited in Gaza itself and opposes taking a hard line.
Thursday’s arrests included two editors of the Hamas-run Al-Watan newspaper, which had published an editorial accusing Arafat’s Palestinian authority of copying the tactics of Gaza’s former Israeli occupiers.