Israel, Palestinians Agree to Speed Talks on Autonomy Plan : Mideast: Some Gaza and West Bank workers to be allowed into Israel. Progress follows weeks of deadlock.

Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed Thursday to speed up negotiations on expanding Palestinian self-rule throughout the West Bank, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said Israel will start easing its closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The reported progress was a much-needed piece of good news for both sides, coming a week after a summit between Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat produced nothing more than mutual recriminations about the deadlock in their negotiations.

After last week’s session, Israeli and Palestinian commentators were declaring the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord dead and predicting the collapse of Rabin’s government.

“Nothing has died,” declared Foreign Minister Shimon Peres after Thursday’s session. “There are difficulties, but we can overcome them.”

After a two-hour session with Arafat on Thursday afternoon, Rabin said he will allow 10,000 workers from Gaza and 5,000 from the West Bank to enter Israel next week.

“All of them are workers whom we know,” and they are all older than 30, Rabin told reporters.

About three times as many workers were entering Israel legally before Israel imposed the closure Jan. 22--after two Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up and killed 21 Israelis at a bus stop.

Israel started importing more workers from abroad after the bombing, and Rabin adopted a policy that seeks to end Israel’s dependence on Palestinian workers in construction, agriculture and other fields.

*

But Arafat and other Palestinian officials have warned that the closure is strangling the Palestinian economy, particularly in Gaza where there are few work alternatives.

Support for Arafat’s self-governing authority has been sinking in opinion polls, and more and more Palestinians are expressing support for “military actions” against Israeli targets.

Rabin’s gesture Thursday seemed to acknowledge Arafat’s growing political problems and the effort that his police and security forces have made recently to foil attacks on Israel and arrest suspected militants.

“The authority foiled six terrorist attacks against us,” said Peres, who attended Thursday’s negotiating session with Rabin and appeared with him at the news conference near Kfar Saba.

Peres said Israel is asking Arafat to take even more measures to prevent attacks on Israelis.

On Thursday, Palestinian police arrested eight members of Islamic Jihad, the group that claimed responsibility for the Jan. 22 bombing. Palestinian police have arrested dozens of members of Islamic Jihad and Hamas, another militant Islamic group, since the bombing.

But Israel is pressing Arafat to bring those who have been arrested to trial, and it wants him to disarm all factions in the Gaza Strip.

Rabin said he and Arafat “agreed on holding intense negotiations so as to overcome our differences on security issues, elections, redeployment, empowerment.”

He said that he and Arafat will meet again in a month, that Peres and Arafat will meet in three weeks and that negotiators from both sides will continue to meet regularly, starting with a session Tuesday in Cairo.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Thursday that he believes that Israel and the Palestinians are close to agreeing on Palestinian elections in the West Bank and Gaza.

Sounding upbeat in an interview in his Jericho office, Erekat said he believes that there may be elections in May or June.

“There will continue to be difficulties and setbacks, but we are moving forward again,” he said.

*

Even as Rabin and Arafat searched for ways to move their peace talks forward, about 300 Jewish settlers gathered in Kiryat Arba, a settlement near the Arab town of Hebron in the West Bank, to mark the anniversary of Baruch Goldstein’s death. A doctor who immigrated from the United States and lived in Kiryat Arba, Goldstein fired on Muslim worshipers as they prayed in the Ibrahim mosque, killing about 30 before he was beaten to death.

Under the Hebrew calendar, the massacre occurred one year ago Thursday.

The mosque is inside the Cave of the Patriarchs. The site is sacred to Muslims and Jews because adherents of both faiths believe that Abraham--their joint patriarch--is buried there with members of his family.

The Israeli army closed the site for months after the Feb. 25 massacre and has installed high-tech security devices and divided Muslim and Jewish worshipers to try to avert violence.

Israeli political and religious leaders condemned the killing as an unprovoked act that almost torpedoed Israel’s peace negotiations with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors. But a small, hard-core group, led by the outlawed Kach movement, has tried to make Goldstein a martyr. Pictures of a smiling Goldstein, superimposed over the Cave of the Patriarchs, were on sale at the memorial service Thursday.

Members of Kach--the movement founded by American-born Rabbi Meir Kahane--had hoped to attract thousands to the Goldstein memorial service.

But the army closed the area around the settlement Wednesday night, turning back those who could not prove they lived in the area. As a result, there were almost as many journalists as mourners at the brief prayer session.

In another development Thursday, the Labor Party Central Committee elected Avraham Burg, 40, the new chairman of the Jewish Agency. The quasi-governmental agency is the institutional link between Israel and Jewish communities around the world.