COLUMN ONE : Arab vs. Arab in the Intifada : The fight to end Israeli rule in the occupied territories has turned into a war among Palestinian factions. Hardened youths are blamed for rising violence.

Some say the trouble began after some 6- and 7-year-olds taunted a column of teen-age Muslim nationalists parading through the winding Old City of Nablus. The Muslims boxed the ears of some of the toddlers and offended their big brothers, who belonged to a rival gang from the Palestine Liberation Organization. Others say the conflict stemmed from simple turf battles between the Muslims and the secular PLO youths.

No matter. Things quickly got out of hand on a recent afternoon in Nablus’ Old City. The rival gangs met, and exchanged pistol and machine-gun shots. Six Palestinian militants were wounded. In a sordid finale, Muslim youths stormed a local hospital and stabbed a wounded PLO rival five times as he lay on the operating table. The youth survived, but the surprise and bitterness is unfading.

“This was a shock,” said Said Kanaan, a Nablus merchant and mainline Palestinian activist. “When I heard the shooting, I thought it was Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians. Unfortunately, it was among ourselves.”

After 3 1/2 years of the Arab uprising against Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, pride in the struggle has turned into embarrassment. Palestinians are waging a war against themselves.

Public and clandestine leaders of the revolt, known as the intifada , express helplessness in the face of intramural squabbles among directionless youth and their brutal attacks on collaborators.

The deepening concern is reflected in frequent appeals for self-control and especially for an end to collaborator killings, which have totaled more than 40 since April 1.

The appeals more often than not fall on deaf ears. Much intifada activity is in the hands of hardened youths who answer only to themselves. “Things are definitely out of control,” said Mahdi Abdel Hadi, a Jerusalem-based political analyst.

Adnan Damiri, a Palestinian journalist for the Al Fajr newspaper, wrote: “The fear relates to everyone. To the writer, the peasant, farmer, the clerk, the laborer and academician. This is a fear which encompasses all strata of the population. We fear for ourselves and from ourselves, from our dream which has become a nightmare.”

Damiri’s words made a special impact on Palestinian readers because he had spent eight years in Israeli prisons on charges of anti-Israeli subversion. He called the intifada “the beast that devours its children.”

The drumbeat of Arab-on-Arab violence has sounded almost without letup since the end of the Persian Gulf War. Last week, a suspected informer in the Gaza Strip was stabbed and hacked with knives and axes and left to die in a car trunk; three masked men fatally stabbed a school janitor in the West Bank town of Hebron on suspicion of fingering young militants to Israeli secret police; masked gunmen fatally shot a woman, and when masked raiders assaulted the home of a suspected collaborator in Gaza, the target struck back by tossing a grenade that killed one attacker. (Informers in Israel’s service often are armed by authorities for protection.)

All the incidents occurred after the clandestine intifada leadership issued a leaflet calling for an end to “kidnapings, interrogations and killings, except those agreed upon by all factions.”

When such slayings first became a prominent feature of the intifada more than a year ago, many activists just shrugged. The killings seemed justified as a means of weeding out criminals and informers. Now, many Palestinian activists say the effort to distinguish between executions and random vengeance attacks only fuels a spiral of violence. “These killings can in no way be excused as housecleaning,” one underground activist said.

Public leaders have blamed the step-up in violence on the uprising’s inconclusive results. Failed diplomacy has bred bitterness among many teen-agers and men in their 20s whose educations have been interrupted and who are mainly skilled at playing at dangerous cat-and-mouse street chases with Israeli soldiers. The population at large is tired and struggling to get by; these youths have no future except revolt--even if it means taking on each other.

The Palestinians’ deteriorating economic condition also plays a role, Palestinians insist. Money from outside has dried up as the Gulf War disrupted the livelihoods of exiles in Kuwait. Israel is cutting off Palestinians from jobs in Israel, where jobless Soviet immigrants are taking their places.

The unwillingness of the young street toughs to curb their conduct throws light on the weakness of Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Unable to deliver gains from their express willingness to compromise with Israel, moderates hold little sway with the gangs, which dominate political life in many towns and villages. Meantime, some local activists vocally challenge the primacy of PLO chief Yasser Arafat. A day after he made an appeal for an end to collaborator killings this week, another body was found in Gaza.

With U.S.-brokered peace talks hanging in the balance, the violence raises the question of how, in the end, fractious, hotheaded rebels will accept negotiations that might take years to produce results--and perhaps fall short of the most radical goals of many Palestinians.

“If the peace process stops, the young cadres will say, ‘Enough is enough.’ Even Arafat himself will be unable to stop armed attacks,” Said Kanaan predicted.

Many gangs are made up of desperate men on the run from the Israeli army. They arm themselves, contending that Israeli hit squads have gunned down militants on the West Bank and in Gaza and they need to defend themselves. Their actions also receive a political color, provided by disputes among PLO factions; there are, of course, factions within factions of the PLO. PLO groups with secular orientations and Muslim nationalists imbued with religious fervor have clashed repeatedly in several places, including Nablus.

Whatever the differences, the political dimension is inevitably overwhelmed by a gangland, Sharks vs. Jets flavor.

Mahmoud--a slender, swaggering 22-year-old Nablus man--blamed the recent violence on Hamas, an acronym that stands for the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas is a PLO rival throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Mahmoud belongs to the Shabiba, or “Guys,” one of four Nablus wings of Fatah, which is the main faction of the four-sided PLO.

Hamas, Mahmoud said, attacked some second-graders and some Shabiba members after hearing insults in a schoolyard. Shabiba and Hamas representatives tried to soothe feelings by agreeing to pull members of each group off the streets of the Old City.

In defiance of the agreement, Hamas paraded its forces Saturday--black-hooded masks are the group’s trademark. Shabiba, wearing their customary black-checked scarves, confronted them, and harsh words turned to gunfire. A Hamas shot a Shabiba in the back; a friend of his responded by pulling out a submachine gun and firing on Hamas.

“They forced us to fight back,” said Mahmoud, with an odd blend of bluster and sheepishness. Two bodyguards, about Mahmoud’s age, smiled at the tale.

Hamas members put a different spin on the affair, although with the same insistence that they were not to blame, claiming they had been framed. “One of the Shabiba came to us in the street and called us” a profanity and “waved his machine gun,” said the Hamas militant who talked to reporters in a building not far away.

Asked about the attack on the Shabiba victim in the hospital, the young man admitted reluctantly, “Yeah, it was probably Hamas that did it.”

Nablus citizens appear to be fed up. A sandwich shop owner, hearing that two reporters had visited the Old City, asked in disbelief, “In there? You have to be crazy.”

The story of the intifada in Nablus is a tale of decaying discipline and fulsome acts of brutality. When the uprising began, the streets were in the hands of toughened former convicts who had been jailed for anti-Israeli plotting. The street captains were taught methods of organization in jail and were able to discipline new recruits to the cause. Hokey uniforms and homemade masks were viewed as a means of giving gangs a sense of cohesiveness. Their homemade axes and swords drew naive laughter from onlookers.

At first, youths limited themselves to warning collaborators to stop cooperating with Israelis in the police and government, refrain from selling them land and, most gravely, to never finger activists to Israeli agents.

The warnings soon gave way to killings, which have snowballed since. The numbers of dead tell only part of the story.

The gruesome trademarks of the executions portray a growing brutality. Suspected collaborators have been dismembered, hung from meat hooks, thrown dead into garbage dumps, stabbed and axed.

The yen for spectacle is evident even in relatively mild cases of punishment. The other day in Nablus, a Fatah faction called Revolutionary Security hauled a suspected thief to the Old City’s main square and flogged him 50 times.

The masks, once viewed as a badge of courage, became sinister emblems of vengeance and ferocity.

Abroad, the PLO boasted that it controlled the “executions” of collaborators. As the toll mounted, the PLO itself ordered a halt, a call widely ignored. In Nablus, a group called the Black Panthers openly paraded with machine guns in hand and boasted of their executions. Last year, the Panthers met their downfall when plainclothes Israeli commandos raided a barbershop where five of them hung out and shot them to death.

Some groups directly attacked veteran PLO sympathizers. Said Kanaan’s general store was ransacked and a relative’s car burned in the street.

Finally, the public leaders could turn a blind eye no more. This week, in an unusual display of chagrin, a group of pro-PLO journalists and professors met at a Jerusalem theater to discuss the turmoil. A subject once only whispered became the topic of an open seminar.

Several participants criticized the PLO for unleashing the killings. Others said the West Bank and Gaza leadership had grown out of touch with the youthful militants.

Admitted Yahiya abu Sharif, a reporter from the Arabic Al Ittihad newspaper: “There is a crisis in the intifada. It is not enough for leaders outside and inside the West Bank and Gaza just to give orders.”

Adnan Damiri, the writer and jail veteran, defended his landmark criticism by declaring, “It is too late to close our eyes and say nothing.”

On the same day, a body was found in Gaza, mutilated with multiple knife wounds in the style that has nudged aside the thrown stone as the mark of the intifada.