Rabin Says He Won’t Abandon Jewish Settlers : Mideast: Prime minister assures Israelis in occupied territories that they’re safe. Meeting follows riots in Gaza and West Bank.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin held out a hand to Jewish settlers Tuesday, promising not to abandon them under Palestinian autonomy.

His meeting with three settler leaders came after riots that paralyzed the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and demonstrated the settlers’ ability to disrupt and possibly wreck the peace accord with the Palestinians.

Violence flared in Gaza again Tuesday. Masked Palestinians rammed a garbage truck into a car with Israeli license plates, killing its Israeli Arab driver. Nearby, about 100 settlers smashed windows of Arab-owned cars and blocked roads to protest the slaying of a settler Sunday.

For more than a year, Rabin had refused to meet with the settlers, sending emissaries to field their complaints. Relations deteriorated after the Sept. 13 signing of the Israel-PLO accord on Palestinian autonomy.

Settler leader Uri Ariel said Tuesday’s meeting might help reduce tensions, but settlers are determined to fight Palestinian autonomy.

“There is a very large gap, I would say nearly an abyss, between us and the government on matters of ideology,” Ariel said.

Rabin pledged that during the five-year interim period of Palestinian autonomy, the Israeli army would remain in charge of protecting settlements rather than the Palestinian police force being formed, a senior aide said.

About 125,000 Israelis live in 144 settlements in the occupied lands, home to 1.8 million Palestinians.

In Cairo, meanwhile, Palestinian and Israeli negotiators agreed Tuesday to restart suspended talks on implementing the Israel-PLO peace accord.

The agreement came after two days of meetings by an Israeli-Palestinian committee formed to settle the differences over Israeli troop withdrawals in occupied lands that led Palestinian negotiators to walk out of the talks a week ago.

The committee did not say where or when the talks would resume.

In Brussels, PLO leader Yasser Arafat predicted that Jordan and Israel would sign a peace accord “within a few days” and said that Syria and Lebanon were moving toward peace with the Jewish state.

Arafat, visiting European Community headquarters to discuss how to distribute nearly $600 million in EC aid for the territories, also said that EC members responded positively to his proposal for a multinational police force for the occupied territories.

But there were reports that France and other members of the 12-nation trading bloc were wary of sending troops to the Middle East.