Midday Riots Mark Israel’s Jericho Pullout : Mideast: Soldiers are pelted with debris for third day as military post is dismantled. They fire back with tear gas, grenades.

As an army of bulldozers carved a new Israeli military border base into the Judean desert just outside town, and as Israeli soldiers hauled air conditioners and furniture from administration buildings they soon will leave behind, this sleepy oasis exploded Monday in a rare display of frenzy and frustration.

For hours, Palestinian men, women and children rained stones and bottles on the small police station that has been the bastion of Israel’s quarter-century of occupation in the heart of Jericho, the town designated as the future capital of an autonomous Palestine.

Israel’s helmeted and heavily armed troops, their faces drawn and weary, responded by firing round after round of tear gas and concussion grenades and an occasional bullet into the adjacent municipal square.

“This is their way of saying goodby,” Samir Fetiani, a 25-year-old microbiologist from Jericho, said as he met a grenade that exploded a few feet away with a smile. “And ours.”

When the smoke cleared from Jericho’s third straight day of midday riots, neither side reported serious casualties.

But the war-zone scene--in a town famous for its passive resistance throughout Israel’s 27 years of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip--underscored the dizzying array of emotion and mixed signals from Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization at a time most Palestinians here hoped would be their liberation.

Amid the many signs of accelerating withdrawal on the ground in Jericho and Gaza on Monday, Israeli and PLO negotiators continued to work feverishly in Cairo to meet a self-imposed April 13 deadline for a final agreement on Israel’s withdrawal and Palestinian self-rule beginning in the two isolated corners of the occupied lands.

PLO officials in Jericho and Gaza said they were instructed by their leadership Monday to prepare for the imminent arrival--perhaps as early as today--of the first eight Palestinian police officers and up to two dozen future Palestinian government officials. They are senior members of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah wing and include some of the 46 Palestinian deportees Israel agreed on Sunday to allow home.

But in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin declared after Monday’s Cabinet session that “it would take a miracle” to complete and sign the final agreement on Palestinian autonomy by mid-April.

Environment Minister Yossi Sarid, a key member of the Israeli negotiating team, added after the Cabinet meeting that he now hopes the agreement can be concluded before the end of the month--and that Arafat can visit a free Jericho in May.

Rabin and Sarid both stressed that they believe full withdrawal could be completed within days of the signing.

Rabin’s key Cabinet adviser, Housing Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, added after the weekly session that the government intends to take as many concrete steps as possible to show it is determined to withdraw.

“Definitely we have agreed, in order to save time, that movement should be from both sides--as well as allowing the Palestinian police . . . to get in,” he said. “At the same time, we are pulling out all forces that are not required to safeguard the area.”

In Gaza, that movement appeared as rapid as it did in Jericho on Monday. The scene there was a mirror image of the far-off town on the Jordanian border that Arafat has selected as his capital. Palestinians hurled stones and insults as Israeli police continued to dismantle entire bases in the heart of Gaza City; the Israelis loaded computers, crates and cabinets onto trucks bound for the Erez checkpoint inside Israeli territory.

The main prison in Gaza City, known to Palestinians as Ansar II, was abandoned after the last 32 Palestinian prisoners were transferred to jails inside Israel. Taken together, all the signs indicated the Israeli army is determined to meet what Israeli opinion polls have reported as a demand of the overwhelming majority of Israelis for months now: Pull out of Gaza and Jericho as quickly as possible.

“Whatever is not absolutely necessary is being removed,” said national police spokesman Eric Bar-Chen. “But we are still there, and we are not leaving just yet.”

Both Israel and the PLO agreed to accelerate the autonomy process last week when they returned to bargaining in Cairo for their first discussions of the “Gaza-Jericho first” agreement, delayed since a Jewish settler massacred about 30 Palestinians in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs on Feb. 25.

The shooting of the unarmed, praying Muslims by Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born physician, set the occupied territories afire with protest and rioting.

Rabin’s government has made increasingly difficult concessions to draw the PLO back to the peace table. Among the compromises: the arrest of all known Jewish extremist leaders in the territories; an armed international observer force for Hebron, and an independent judicial inquiry into the massacre, which the government officially has blamed on a lone, deranged man.

In testimony before that commission Monday, a police ballistics expert appeared to reinforce a theory, built on earlier testimony, that Goldstein may not have acted alone.

Lior Nadivi, national police inspector, told the five-member panel that mystery surrounds the 115th shell casing that Israeli investigators said they found at the massacre site.

Ballistic tests, he said, proved that 109 of the shells were fired from Goldstein’s assault rifle. Five others were traced to weapons of Israeli soldiers, who testified earlier that they fired toward the mosque’s exits but did not hit anyone. “I know (the 115th) shell was not fired by any of the guns that I checked,” Nadivi said.

Assessing the likelihood of a second gunman, Israeli army investigator Brig. Gen. David Agmon said he believed that theory was “possible, but not probable.”

Many Palestinians said that years of perceived neglect by Israelis, combined with a bold new sense of imminent liberation, fueled the pre-departure rioting in Jericho and Gaza.

“Part of me is about to panic,” Saeb Erekat, the PLO’s most senior official in Jericho, said after the riots began to subside. “But another part says: ‘Don’t panic. Get yourself together. You’ve got a lot to do.’ ”