In Gaza, Fear of Anarchy Triggers Illegal-Arms Boom : Mideast: Palestinians worry Israeli withdrawal will leave void in which feuds, political violence can grow.

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.

But while the cost of weaponry is soaring--just three months ago, a 9-millimeter pistol went for a third that amount--Gaza’s black market in illegal arms is booming. The reason: fear.

Unlike Shawa, Palestinians throughout the occupied territories have been scrambling to stock up on pistols, machine guns, assault rifles and ammunition in recent months, most of them desperate for a measure of personal protection in advance of Israel’s promised withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho.

For Israel, the weapons proliferation illustrates an issue that has been central to the delay in its troop withdrawal, originally scheduled to begin last Dec. 13 and put off for at least another week late Sunday when talks between PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres ended in Switzerland without a final agreement.

Partly out of fear of an even larger influx of firepower into their back yard, Israeli negotiators have been insisting that their troops maintain military control of the border crossings into the new Palestinian entity. The Palestinians have insisted that policing the borders is critical to their new autonomy.

The border controversy was at the top of the list of tentative weekend compromises made by Arafat and Peres.

At the core of the growing gun problem in the territories is a concern as human as it is political. It is the shared worry among Israelis and Palestinians that the dawning of a new age of autonomy after nearly three decades under strict military occupation will bring a new era of anarchy as well.

“There is a lot of confusion and fear in Gaza for ordinary people,” said Shawa, whom Arafat named chief executive of the capital of the emerging autonomous Gaza.

“It is a fear of the unknown, a fear that if there is no law, no order, no one to settle feuds, there is going to be a period of trouble. People are desperate to have protection.”

The run on guns in Gaza has driven the price of a U.S.-made M-16 rifle to nearly $9,000--a jump of $2,000 in two months. A Russian-made AK-47 goes for $6,500. The price of a single bullet that sells for 30 cents in Israel now costs $4 in the occupied territories, a premium that has drawn children to scavenge at Israeli army firing ranges.

Many Palestinians, and some Israeli lawmakers, blame the Israeli military for the proliferation of arms. Israeli troops still control the territories’ borders, and critics assert that border guards deliberately permit the weapons and ammunition to pass through their checkpoints from Egypt and Jordan. In a land where such conspiracy theories are common after 27 years of sometimes-harsh military occupation, those critics suggest that the Israeli aim is to fuel future infighting among the territories’ many Palestinian factions.

Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Mordechai Gur flatly denied that charge last week, and sources in the Israel Defense Forces called the allegation “absurd.”

Gur’s denial, delivered in the Israeli Parliament, or Knesset, reflected the elevation of the gun issue to an integral part of Israel’s national debate on the peace process.

Responding to charges by Israeli legislators that the army is ignoring the arms surge in the territories, Gur confirmed in the Knesset that Palestinians in the territories are stockpiling weapons. But he insisted in his testimony that the Israel Defense Forces are working hard to track down and destroy arms caches in Gaza and the West Bank.

“How can you even conceive of such a thing?” Gur asked the legislators who raised the issue. “Is it even conceivable that we would treat a flow of weapons to the Gaza Strip calmly, when our soldiers are in the strip and fighting in it?”

In fact, Gur said, the military is intensifying its weapons searches throughout the territories.

There was ample evidence in recent weeks to support his assertion.

Last week in the small West Bank village of Aboud, Israeli soldiers conducted a weapons search as destructive as it was meticulous at a Palestinian house that is now riddled with holes.

It was the home of Mahmoud Abdul Majid, whose five sons were arrested in early January as suspected Palestinian terrorists. Two of the boys were released two weeks later. The other three were kept in an Israeli jail for further interrogation. Last week, the army returned to the Abdul Majid’s house and systematically began taking it apart.

The family showed a visiting reporter walls that had been cracked open, floors ripped up, a bathroom torn inside out and the bedroom of one of the detained sons--a 28-year-old plumber--taken completely apart. Throughout the search, which the family said took 14 hours and spanned two days, the soldiers told them they were looking for an arms stockpile the family insisted did not exist.

An Israeli military spokesman confirmed that soldiers had conducted the search. The Abdul Majid house was targeted, he said, because the brothers were caught with bomb-making materials when they were arrested.

The army spokesman stressed that the search exhibited “the ongoing efforts by the Israel Defense Forces to locate and identify illegal weapons in the territories--especially among those who are against the peace.” But he confirmed that in the end, nothing was found at the Abdul Majid house.

Many Palestinians do not blame Israel’s security forces alone for the recent arms flow into the territories. Some leveled charges of negligence against the leaders of several Palestinian factions represented in Gaza, particularly Arafat’s Fatah wing. That faction will supply most of the officers in the Palestinian police force planned for control of law and order in Gaza and Jericho as Israel withdraws.

Local Palestine Liberation Organization leaders confirm that it will be up to the new police to crack down on the weapons flow after the Israelis withdraw. But Shawa and other members of Arafat’s handpicked team fear it may be too late by then.

Their fear goes beyond the potential for armed conflict between Fatah and an extremist opposition of fundamentalist Islamic groups and leftist political parties that also sponsor well-armed rebels in the territories.

Much of the worry is grounded in ancient family feuds that have simmered beneath the surface of Gaza’s society throughout the occupation. Israel’s military presence, combined with a shared commitment among most Gazans to join forces against a more powerful common enemy, froze most of those feuds in place.

“But the memory is long in Gaza,” Shawa said. “Maybe it was a woman, maybe a rape, maybe a piece of land. Maybe it happened 30 years ago, or maybe 300. But everyone here remembers.

“Now that guns are everywhere here, this could be a disaster. If the police fail to take immediate control--a difficult task even in the best of times--these feuds easily could explode the moment the common enemy is gone.”