PLO Appears Unprepared to Exercise Authority Now : Mideast: Officials have not yet been named to run essential services. It will be weeks before Palestinian police are deployed.

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho entered their long-awaited period of self-government Thursday only to find that the Palestine Liberation Organization was unprepared to exercise the authority it won in months of tough negotiations with Israel.

In the Gaza Strip, 22 senior Palestinian police commanders began preliminary talks on assuming control of the area from Israeli forces that have occupied it for nearly 27 years, but they said that it will take three weeks to fully deploy 6,000 rank-and-file police officers.

In Jericho, the Israeli general commanding the West Bank declared the city a “closed military area,” surrounding it with combat troops and allowing only residents to enter, as Jewish settlers continued to protest the planned Israeli withdrawal from the ancient town.

And Israeli officials here expressed their fears that essential services--health care, water supplies and electrical power, among others--will collapse unless the PLO quickly designates officials to take charge of Gaza and Jericho as 700 Israelis in the military government pull out.

“We are leaving, and we are eager to do so and implement this agreement on autonomy,” said Uri Dromi, director of the Israeli government press office. “But we just can’t walk away and let chaos reign. There must be at least someone there to whom we can hand the keys.”

Israel fears that the PLO will ask for a delay in the withdrawal beyond May 25, Dromi said, as it tries to organize itself.

“At this point, we have to ask, ‘Are we sure of anything?’ ” he replied when asked whether previously announced transition timetables still held.

Among Palestinian politicians on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, the mood was bleak--not only because of the poorly planned assumption of power but because of the intense infighting in the PLO’s top ranks at its headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia, that has compounded the problems here.

In Cairo, chief Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath counseled patience, promising that PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat would appoint a 24-member council next week to administer Gaza and Jericho and that the Palestinian police will be deployed within three weeks, arriving before the Israeli withdrawal.

“It is very obvious as we are getting into Gaza and Jericho that this is the first opportunity the Palestinian people have had after long years of occupation to have their own government on their own land,” Shaath said. “This means that not everything can go as smoothly as one would want to. But the delays are really within the agreement itself. We are not delaying the implementation beyond the three weeks in the agreement.”

But measured against Palestinian hopes, the immediate changes were largely symbolic, not the sweeping moves envisioned in the autonomy agreement signed by Israel and the PLO in Cairo this week.

Israel on Thursday freed about 800 Palestinian prisoners and in the process emptied the main prison in Gaza City, long a symbol of the occupation.

But the number freed was 400 fewer than planned. At least 3,400 more prisoners are still to be released under terms of the accord.

The Palestinian police commanders, 17 of whom arrived only Wednesday, talked with their Israeli counterparts for more than five hours in their first meeting.

The first contingent of a 160-member international observer force arrived to take up positions Sunday in the West Bank city of Hebron, where a Jewish settler massacred about 30 Muslim worshipers at a mosque in February. The observers, who will be unarmed, come from Norway, Denmark and Italy. Observers will later be stationed in Gaza and Jericho.

The deployment of the new Palestinian police, who will eventually number 9,000, is a key political move, for it replaces the Israeli occupation with an accepted Palestinian authority, as well as preserving order during the transition. Palestinians not only in the Gaza Strip but the West Bank have looked toward the force’s arrival as their day of liberation.

During the interim, as Palestinian commanders prepare to take charge of the region, Israeli forces will continue to follow the same orders they have had throughout the occupation, he said.

“We are still responsible in the area, and we will continue to be until the last day, including action against those who continue to oppose the peace agreement--especially those who continue to make terror acts against us,” Col. Shuki Shichrur said.

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Times staff writers Mark Fineman in Gaza City and Kim Murphy in Cairo contributed to this report.