PLO and Israel Agree to Resume Self-Rule Talks : Mideast: Negotiators break impasse after resolving security questions in Hebron, site of mosque massacre.

After agreeing on interim security arrangements for the West Bank city of Hebron in a nine-hour bargaining session, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization announced early today that they will restart formal negotiations on Palestinian autonomy.

The announcements broke a five-week deadlock that began when a Jewish settler massacred about 30 Palestinian worshipers in Hebron on Feb. 25.

The two sides issued brief statements announcing that the heads of their delegations will sign the Hebron agreement here this morning and that talks on implementing the long-delayed Palestinian autonomy in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho will begin later in the day.

“The head of the Israeli delegation to the negotiations, Maj. Gen. Amnon Lipkin Shahak, announces that after midnight an agreement was reached between the Israeli and Palestinian delegations on the issue of security arrangements in Hebron,” said the Israeli statement, released by an army spokesman.

Labeling the agreement “a compromise formula,” Israel Radio reported today that PLO negotiators agreed to give up demands for a Palestinian police force in Hebron in exchange for a larger international observer force than Israel had originally been willing to permit.

Quoting Nabil Shaath, chief delegate for the PLO, the Voice of Israel said that, under the compromise, the international force would include 150 military observers from several European nations and that they would be armed.

Shaath emerged briefly from the hotel room where he has been negotiating with Shahak, Israel’s deputy chief of staff, to confirm the agreement. “We have agreed on security in Hebron and on the resumption of talks on Gaza-Jericho,” said Shaath, who added that he would provide details of the agreement later in the day.

“I am completely exhausted,” he said.

President Clinton said the agreement means the Middle East peace process is back on track. “It’s very, very encouraging to me, and I hope it will be to all the American people,” he told reporters Wednesday outside the San Diego seaside manor where he is spending a week on vacation.

The agreement on Hebron was the key to resuming what both sides had predicted will be accelerated negotiations to implement Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and Jericho along with an Israeli troop withdrawal that was to have been completed by April 13.

Negotiators had made halting progress through the night Wednesday after two weeks of informal, face-to-face talks aimed at boosting security for Palestinians in the city where the massacre took place.

Earlier, PLO sources said up to 100 Palestinian police also would be assigned in Hebron.

As the negotiations in Cairo went on, clashes continued to leave dead and wounded Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel has insisted on maintaining overall security control in Hebron, calling for Palestinian police to remain under Israeli command, although it has reportedly agreed that Palestinians on joint patrols with Israelis would travel in separate vehicles.

Israeli negotiators also have refused to allow anything more than personal pistols as arms for the Arab police. And while Israel’s negotiators agreed to the idea of lightly armed international observers, up until Wednesday night they opposed anything but Norwegian, Finnish and Danish troops on the international force.

Meantime, by Wednesday, negotiators made progress on several other key security points. For example, PLO sources said Israel agreed to allow the deployment of up to 10,000 Palestinian police in Gaza and Jericho, up from its previous limit of 8,500 officers, a key stumbling block in the self-rule talks since October.

The Israelis also reportedly agreed to allow the PLO to appoint the governor of Hebron.

As the Israeli-PLO talks continued in Cairo on Wednesday, Israel’s military command took extreme steps in the occupied territories to prevent a fresh outbreak of widespread violence after Tuesday’s storm of protests against the shooting deaths of six of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s activists in the Gaza Strip.

New military orders calling for restraint by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were issued to minimize clashes, and strict curfews were clamped on more than two dozen towns--Hebron among them.

The curfews confined more than 300,000 Palestinians to their homes.

Despite the curfews, an 18-year-old Palestinian was shot and killed after he stoned an Israeli car near the West Bank town of Nablus. Palestinian sources blamed the shooting on a Jewish settler, who they said fired on a group of Palestinian youths by the roadside. An army spokesman said the incident is under investigation.

There were also reports of five more Palestinians wounded during clashes with Israeli security forces in Hebron, where violence has erupted routinely in spite of almost constant curfews in the past month.

But, on a day of traditional Arab protest, the Israeli military’s strategy appeared to have kept most of the occupied lands tense but largely peaceful after a day of violent demonstrations left one Arab dead and more than 75 wounded.

General strikes and annual protest rallies unrelated to the troubled peace process also shut down East Jerusalem and most Arab towns inside Israel as well, as Israel’s 850,000 Arab citizens staged demonstrations to commemorate Land Day. On that day in 1976, Israeli soldiers and police killed six Arabs protesting the confiscation of Arab lands in the Galilee region.

The Land Day demonstrations passed peacefully after Israeli authorities, fearing widespread Arab unrest, agreed not to enter any of the Arab towns within Israel or intervene in the rallies.

But anger seethed in Hebron. So did fears about a protest march scheduled for today by Jewish extremists and Israel’s political right wing. The protest march is to take place in Kiryat Arba, the home of Baruch Goldstein--the Brooklyn-born doctor involved in the Hebron mosque massacre--and his family and friends.

The settlers and the nation’s right-wing leaders organized their protest as a warning to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that there will be a backlash of civil disobedience if he attempts to relocate the 415 Jewish settlers in Hebron--a key demand of Arafat’s negotiating team.

On Wednesday, Israeli military authorities also sought to defend the actions of the undercover army unit in Gaza against a series of allegations and unanswered questions surrounding Monday night’s shooting in Gaza.

In the face of continuing criticism that the undercover officers opened fire on the Fatah activists without provocation and without attempting first to identify or arrest their targets, army spokesmen and Defense Ministry officials said the undercover squad had no time to do so.

Acting under orders that still permit security forces to shoot at any armed Palestinians who present a potential threat in the territories, the undercover squad was fully justified in opening fire on six masked men wearing camouflage uniforms and bearing arms, the officials said.

They added that the army regretted that the squad had killed six of the activists who will be needed to help integrate the future Palestinian police force into the territories. One senior military officer in Gaza said the army will now work toward establishing a “hot line” to coordinate with Fatah in the future.

As a result of the shootings, reports in Israel’s Hebrew press said that Israeli commanders did issue new orders for all security forces in the territories to refrain from confrontations and to limit clashes in the coming days.

Still, there was continuing criticism of the operation from the Israeli human-rights group B’tselem, which confirmed eyewitness accounts that at least one of the six men was killed in cold blood after he was wounded.

And Israeli Communications Minister Shulamit Aloni, leader of the left-wing Meretz faction in Rabin’s ruling coalition, called for the army to suspend its hunt for armed activists from all Palestinian parties in the Gaza Strip.

Murphy reported from Cairo and Fineman from Jerusalem.