Palestinians Kill 2 Israeli Soldiers at Checkpoint : Mideast: Slayers escape unpursued into newly autonomous Gaza. Incident tests peace pact with PLO.

One of Israel’s worst fears became reality Friday when Palestinian militants gunned down and killed two Israeli soldiers at an unfortified checkpoint just inside the Gaza Strip from this border station and then fled without pursuit into the newly autonomous territory.

The pre-dawn killings came just 48 hours after Israel ended 27 years of military occupation in Gaza. For both Israel’s border troops and the Palestinian police force that inherited most of the strip this week, it was the first major test of key provisions of the peace agreement that liberated Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho.

By all accounts, both sides failed the test.

Although the attack occurred close to a heavily fortified Israeli border station, no Israeli troops pursued the gunmen as they sped off into the newly liberated Palestinian territory. The self-rule accord signed earlier this month by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat after eight months of meticulous negotiations specifically permits such pursuit by Israeli forces in just such circumstances.

Israel Radio said the attackers drove up to the checkpoint in a car, appeared to stop for a security check and shot the two soldiers as they approached the vehicle. The car then sped south as another Israeli soldier fired after it.

The killings were followed closely by the wounding of two Israeli garbage collectors in a drive-by shooting near a Jewish settlement in Gaza.

Hours later, Rabin exercised his only other option: He sealed the Erez border crossing, barring all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from entering Israel for the next nine days and canceling about 2,500 work permits held by Gaza residents.

For their part, Gaza’s new Palestinian police commanders, who are required under the self-rule accord to investigate and apprehend those who stage such attacks, did nothing to bring the assailants to justice.

Senior PLO officials and Palestinian military officers whose responsibility it now is to control the Gaza Strip offered apologies for the slayings.

Maj. Gen. Nasser Yussef, the Palestinian commander in Gaza, vowed to take steps to prevent such killings in the future.

But most of the newly arrived police force spent much of the day greeting long-lost relatives and recovering from the arduous journeys that brought them to Gaza this week from throughout the Arab world.

“This is a failure for us,” acknowledged Hisham Abdel Razzak, a key PLO leader in Gaza who spent 19 years in Israeli prisons. “But the Israeli public must understand how the situation is. . . . We, the police, are not yet prepared for all of this. We have not yet organized.”

Razzak blamed Western donors for failing to deliver the cash needed to assemble the 2,500-strong force and to bring in additional forces.

Nabil Shaath, head of the PLO delegation that negotiated the key details of the self-rule accord, was making a surprise 24-hour visit to Gaza during the attack, and he told reporters that it was not unexpected.

“I knew that some incident would happen, and I am very sorry,” he said, interrupting daylong organizational meetings to discuss the killings outside the Palestinians’ new beachfront police headquarters in Gaza City. “But I am not alarmed. We must now try to prevent a recurrence of this sort of incident.”

Shaath met with Israel’s deputy army chief, Gen. Amnon Shahak, and announced afterward that Palestinian and Israeli security forces will begin joint patrols in the Gaza Strip today. Like Shaath, Yossi Sarid, Israel’s environment minister and a key architect of the peace plan, tried to play down the significance of the killings of the two soldiers, both fathers of newborn children.

“These are the first days of the agreement,” Sarid told Israel Radio. “At this time, incidents like these are expected. We hope that when the Palestinian police strengthens, gets organized, pulls itself together, the number of attacks will decrease gradually.”

But the sheer number of underground Palestinian armed groups that claimed responsibility for Friday’s attacks in Gaza illustrated what the new Palestinian police, most of them loyal to Arafat’s more moderate faction of the PLO, are up against in the well-armed, impoverished and increasingly lawless Gaza Strip.

From the minarets of mosques throughout Gaza City, all holding special Friday prayers before today’s Eid al Adha religious holiday, the fundamentalist Islamic faction Hamas proclaimed that it had staged the attack.

A handwritten poster attributed to Hamas and left outside Gaza City’s police headquarters also warned the new Palestinian force: “Don’t help the Satans and aggressors in our land. . . . This will increase hatred among Palestinians and lead to a new uprising.”

Another Palestinian fundamentalist group, the Islamic Jihad (Holy War), also took responsibility for the slayings in leaflets handed to journalists in Gaza and in a handwritten statement faxed to news agencies in Jerusalem.

Yet a third militant faction opposed to the Israeli-PLO autonomy accord, the Damascus-based leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, claimed in a telephone call to Israel Army Radio that it had staged the drive-by shooting of the garbage collectors near Gaza’s Gush Katif Jewish settlement.

Briefing the security committee of Rabin’s Cabinet on the situation that Israel left behind in Gaza on Thursday afternoon, military Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak cited the many armed groups that oppose the accord--as well as a general increase in street crime and looting--to bolster his assessment that the Gaza Strip is now teetering dangerously close to total anarchy.

There was ample evidence of that chaos throughout the strip Friday. As newly arrived Palestinian police hugged and kissed relatives en route to a weekend leave to celebrate today’s Muslim holiday, traffic snarled, water mains burst and crime continued apace.

Gone were the traffic police who had taken up positions earlier in the week. And Palestinian officials confirmed that formal police patrols will not begin until early next week.

Despite the government’s attempts to dismiss the shootings as birth pangs in an experiment in Palestinian autonomy, the reaction from Rabin’s opponents was swift and furious.

Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud Party, said the attack proved that the policy of Rabin’s ruling Labor Party to make peace with Israel’s Arab enemies “has failed.” And Rafael Eitan, leader of another conservative opposition party, said Arafat’s new police force is incapable of controlling the fundamentalist Hamas.

“I suggest now sending in huge numbers of troops and killing all the Hamas people and fighting them before they massacre women and children in the (Jewish settlements) or even outside the strip,” Eitan told Israel Radio.

Even members of Rabin’s own party expressed deep concern. Ori Orr, who heads the security and foreign affairs committee in Israel’s Parliament, said the entire peace process “will fail if this arrangement will not stand up to the security test.”

“To stand up to the security test means (that) terror decreases. If terror increases, there will be no agreement. There will be no one to support the agreement, not just in the opposition but in the Labor Party.”

Environment Minister Sarid conceded that if such attacks continue or worsen, it will jeopardize scheduled negotiations to expand Palestinian self-rule to include all of the West Bank in the coming years.

Referring specifically to Arafat, who backed down earlier in the week from a speech in which he called for an Islamic holy war to liberate the disputed city of Jerusalem, Sarid said that if such a holy war materializes, “that will be the end of the experiment.”

“I assume he (Arafat) understands this. . . . If he proves his efforts are productive and honest, the experiment will continue. If he cannot, or will not, it will finish there, with our withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho.”