Gaza Rage Boils Over After PLO Activists’ Deaths

Amid cries of “Blood for blood!” and “No peace after today!” the occupied territories exploded in violent protests Tuesday, the day after Israeli security forces in the Gaza Strip killed six supporters of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.

The latest displays of rage further imperiled the Middle East peace process, already plunged into crisis by last month’s massacre of about 30 praying Palestinians in a Hebron mosque.

On Tuesday, as Israeli soldiers opened fire on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, wounding more than 75 and killing one, Palestine Liberation Organization leaders in Gaza City and the West Bank called for a suspension and “comprehensive re-evaluation” of the entire peace process.

The day’s violence also left four Israeli soldiers and three civilians wounded, among them a 70-year-old construction worker who was in critical condition after he was attacked with axes by two Palestinian laborers from Gaza in a town near Tel Aviv.

PLO and Israeli officials met in Cairo on Tuesday, even as Arafat--who denounced the Gaza killings as one “in a line of massacres that the Israeli army took part in”--called an emergency meeting of his organization in Tunis, Tunisia.

In Israel, officials said that the Palestinians killed late Monday night--contrary to some earlier reports of the incident--were not on any “most wanted” lists and that they had not fired at Israeli troops before they were shot. PLO officials in the occupied territories said local Israeli officials had apologized to them for the incident.

As for the closed Cairo sessions with the Israelis, PLO leaders stressed that they were not negotiations, or even discussions or meetings. The PLO said its representatives saw the Israelis in “a simple act of receiving answers” to Palestinian demands on a security agreement for Hebron and on questions arising from Monday night’s shooting.

The two sides thus failed to reach a predicted breakthrough Tuesday to restart formal talks on implementing the long-delayed Sept. 13 agreement for limited Palestinian autonomy, beginning in Jericho and the Gaza Strip.

In his angry public reaction to the killings, Arafat, in an interview aired on Israeli television, demanded that Israel explain whether Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was aware of his military’s plans to slay his PLO supporters. He blamed their deaths on “a secret organization from within the Israeli army. . . . The crime is deliberate, the timing is deliberate and the aim is to sabotage the peace process.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a prime mover behind the peace talks, insisted that the troops “had no sinister intentions.” He called the shootings “regrettable,” stressing, “It was not done by intention.”

But in and around Gaza’s largest, most squalid refugee camp, as families of the six slain members of Arafat’s Fatah faction mourned and buried their dead, angry local leaders called Monday night’s shootings “cold-blooded murder.”

Zakaria Agha, Arafat’s handpicked future governor of Gaza, said he knew all six dead men. He said he had advised Arafat to retaliate by suspending all negotiations with Israel for now.

He said he urged the PLO--whose support is at its nadir in the territories, especially in Gaza--to demand deployment of an international military observer force in the Gaza Strip, besides the West Bank city of Hebron.

He also said Palestinians must insist on the immediate withdrawal of all Israeli troops from Gaza and Jericho, which the “Gaza-Jericho first” agreement signed in September stated would begin last Dec. 13 and be completed before April 13.

Agha and half a dozen witnesses asserted in interviews that Monday night’s killings included at least one summary execution of a Palestinian by an Israeli undercover officer. The Palestinian witnesses insisted that the men were gunned down without provocation as they handed out leaflets in the Jabaliya refugee camp.

There was a running dispute as to whether the men were armed and whether they wore masks and dressed in camouflage, as described in official accounts given by Israeli military sources. But even Israel’s version made it clear that none of the six men fired on the undercover unit before they were killed--some of them by being shot repeatedly at close range.

When the undercover Israeli unit attacked, the six men were distributing leaflets encouraging support for Arafat’s Fatah and urging the many Palestinian political factions to unite, witnesses said. The leaflets were signed by Fatah’s “secret military wing,” the Fatah Hawks.

Although they have insisted they are trying to preserve the peace process, Israeli authorities have said they will continue to fire on armed Palestinians; several Gazans speculated that the men were killed when the undercover unit mistook them for members of the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas, which opposes the talks.

Witnesses described in detail how Nahed Odeh, one of the slain activists, was chased by an undercover agent as he tried to flee the gunfire while wounded. “One of the undercover men grabbed him from inside the shop, pulled him out onto the stairs, put his foot on the back of his neck and fired four times into his head,” said Nowfal Abu Eida, who lives next door.

Agha, the local PLO leader, insisted at a Gaza City news conference that the six men were not even Fatah Hawks. He said they were veteran activists in Fatah’s political wing and had spent years in Israeli prisons before the Israeli-PLO accord was signed in September.

Late last month, Arafat suspended formal negotiations to implement the Gaza-Jericho agreement when Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born extremist settler, massacred about 30 Palestinian worshipers in the Cave of the Patriarchs on Feb. 25.

After Monday night’s killings, most PLO leaders in the territories concluded they have little hope for the future of the Israel-PLO accord. “Mr. Rabin is just moving massacres from one place to another,” declared Saeb Erekat, a West Bank PLO leader who added that he believes “the peace process is coming to an end.”

U.S. officials, brokers of the overall Middle East peace process that began more than two years ago, were cautious about the effect of Monday’s incident on the talks. “There’s a race here against time--between the violence on the ground (versus) the political negotiations,” a senior U.S. official said. ‘There’s no way of telling which will overtake the other at any given time. But it’s U.S. policy to push forward as hard as possible.”

There were signs in the occupied territories Tuesday that the violence was winning the race. Palestinians in more than half a dozen towns traded stones for bullets in the street violence that has become a staple of life here since the Hebron massacre.

In the impoverished Gaza Strip, seething with fury and vows of revenge, local PLO leader Agha predicted, “Every action has a reaction. . . . Surely, we will face difficult days ahead.”

Musa Abdul Nabi--a cousin of slain activist Jamal Abdul Nabi, 37, who left behind a wife and seven children--observed of the violence and protracted talks with Israel: “It gives me the feeling of helplessness. All of these men who were killed were well-known supporters of the peace process. . . . Now, we need protection from the world--to protect us from the Israelis.”

At the wake for Odeh--the 29-year-old father of two and gate guard at a Gaza university who allegedly was hunted and executed by the Israelis after he was wounded--his younger brother was numb with grief. “It was a shock. I just feel shock,” Zohair Mohammed Odeh said.

Asked why his brother was killed, Odeh shook his head and said, “The Israelis think, they’re leaving, so just kill these guys. . . . They just want to kill. Killing is in their blood. Before, everybody supported the peace process. But not anymore. They killed my brother. They killed my people. They’re killing everybody, so why support this process?”

Times staff writer Kim Murphy in Cairo contributed to this report.