Israel, PLO to Resume Peace Plan Discussions : Mideast: Charges that Palestinians reneged on agreement are dropped. But bitter feelings remain.

After a weeklong quarrel that dramatized the fragility of their original peace accord, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization said Thursday that they will resume discussions on plans for Israel’s military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and West Bank and for Palestinian self-government.

In a compromise meant to restore momentum to the peace negotiations, Israel backed away from its angry charges that the PLO had reneged on an agreement resolving the main issues that have been holding up the Israeli withdrawal, and the PLO pledged that future agreements will not be subject to change.

With that, the two sides announced their intention to resume negotiations on Monday at the Red Sea resort of Taba in Egypt, thus ending an impasse that, while not endangering the basic peace accord, has placed the timetable for its implementation in serious doubt.

A joint communique said the next round of talks will be based on those disputed “understandings,” effectively putting the two sides back to work on three key problems--the size of the autonomous Jericho district in the West Bank, control of border crossings into Gaza and Jericho and security for Jewish settlers remaining in the Gaza Strip.

“In essence, we have agreed to resume in Taba and try to resolve the problems,” a PLO source said in Cairo.

And as a gesture of goodwill, Israel announced the release today of 101 more Palestinian prisoners from Gaza and the West Bank as part of the ongoing process of reaching a settlement.

But Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin warned that, if the PLO withdraws from compromises reached last month in Cairo in negotiations between Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, the chief PLO negotiator, “we will not feel we are committed to what we said on certain issues.”

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Visiting an Israeli settlement in the Jericho area, Rabin said Israel will not be pushed into unwise compromises by the timetable for Palestinian autonomy laid out in the accord with the PLO.

“There are no sacred dates,” he said. “Every phase has to be negotiated, agreed, signed and only then be implemented. . . . I don’t see any major problem in postponing. The dates are secondary to the purpose of the whole agreement.”

Peres said Israel is ready to make changes in the language and style of the compromises reached in Cairo but will stand firm on the substance.

“They learned that when we say that we won’t retreat from Israel’s security needs, we are serious,” Peres said, insisting that reopening the talks will not mean more Israeli concessions. “It’s not a matter of tactics, and it’s not a matter of haggling. I hope they learned that lesson.”

Bitter feelings remained on both sides, and future negotiations seem certain to be even more laborious as Israelis try to spell out every detail in writing and the PLO representatives then refer every clause back to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat for approval.

The dispute required dozens of telephone calls and faxed messages between Peres and PLO officials, including Abbas and Nabil Shaath, an adviser to Arafat.

Egyptian mediators were again involved, persuading the Israelis that the PLO was not reneging.

“In the spirit of the process, you don’t go and change the whole text, but if you have amendments to make, that’s only natural,” a source close to negotiations said in Cairo.

But the lengthy argument over whether there had been an agreement did set the peace process back, the source added.

“Rather than spending the last 10 days resolving the outstanding problems, we had to go back and reaffirm the basis upon which we were conducting the discussions,” he said.

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Shaath was more optimistic, saying the outstanding issues are not impossible to resolve.

“I feel we have come a long way . . . and are over the tempest over the claims there was an agreement in Cairo,” he said.

The Palestinians remain resentful, however, that Israel blamed them for reneging on agreements they insist were never reached.

They attribute the crisis to domestic Israeli politics, hinting privately that Peres spoke prematurely in the hope of taking credit for a breakthrough.

The pause, in fact, suited Rabin politically because it enhanced his image among Israelis as committed to ensuring the country’s security and not ready to conclude an agreement at any price.

But Arafat, who Israelis said upped his demands after his negotiator agreed to key compromises, has also been seeking to show himself to Palestinians as a tough bargainer.

With so much time lost, the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are under greater pressure to reach agreement on implementing the autonomy agreement so that Israel can complete its troop withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho by the April 13 target date, handing over the administration there to the PLO.

In Jerusalem on Thursday, police shot and killed a Palestinian after he stabbed and seriously wounded a soldier.

Police said Ahmed Abed Wahab, 20, from the occupied Gaza Strip, belonged to Islamic Jihad, a radical Muslim group that opposes the peace talks.

Since Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed a peace accord Sept. 13 in Washington, 52 Palestinians have died in clashes with Israelis, and 19 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians, according to figures compiled by the Associated Press.

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Parks reported from Jerusalem, Murphy from Cairo.