Israel Praises Palestinian Crackdown on Militants : Gaza Strip: Muslim opponents of peace say 150 to 200 of their members have been arrested. They warn they will retaliate.

Israeli officials Tuesday applauded PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s crackdown on Islamic militants but urged him to do still more, even as the extremist groups warned that they will retaliate against Israel in the wake of the mass roundup of their supporters.

Supporters of the fundamentalist Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, and the smaller Islamic Jihad said that between 150 and 200 members of their groups have been arrested in an operation the Palestinian Authority began in the Gaza Strip on Sunday after two Islamic militants launched separate suicide attacks outside two Jewish settlements.

The Palestinian Authority tried two more members of Islamic Jihad in newly activated military courts that met in secrecy Monday night. One activist was sentenced to life in prison for inciting youngsters to carry out suicide bombing attacks against Israel. Another was awaiting sentencing Tuesday.

The crackdown brought warnings from Palestinian academics that a civil war could erupt between Arafat’s forces and those of the Islamic militants. But the Iziddin al-Qassam military unit of Hamas issued a leaflet Tuesday saying it will make Israel the target of its response to the arrests.

“The Iziddin al-Qassam brigades call on (Prime Minister Yitzhak) Rabin not to be so happy . . . for the arrest of our holy strugglers, and assert that these (arrests) have crossed our red lines,” said the leaflet, delivered to news agencies in Gaza.

“It calls on him also to prepare as many coffins as possible for his soldiers and his settler pigs because our response toward these arrests will be against our primary enemy, and it will come as soon as possible and in the midst of the Zionist entity.”

Hamas and Islamic Jihad have carried out a string of suicide bombings inside Israel and in territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority, leaving 65 Israelis dead since October. The organizations say they want to wreck the September, 1993, peace accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization that granted Palestinians limited autonomy in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

For months, Arafat has tried to negotiate with the groups. He has carried out 11 waves of mass arrests, 10 of them after bombing attacks and under pressure from Israel and the United States to prevent attacks on Israelis and protect the peace accord.

On Tuesday, his officials insisted that the latest arrests were different from previous sweeps. In the past, before the military courts began taking action, scores of militants were rounded up after attacks only to be released within days without being charged.

Israel has said that Arafat must arrest, prosecute and jail both guerrillas and spiritual leaders who urge attacks on Israelis or he risks further delays in Israel’s already much-delayed withdrawal of troops from the West Bank. Israel also has demanded for months that Arafat disarm the militants, dismantle their training camps and ferret out their bomb-making factories.

There was no sign Tuesday that Arafat is prepared to go that far. Those arrested have been academics and political leaders of the organizations, although some spiritual leaders also have been targeted. No guerrillas have yet been detained.

But one Palestinian official warned Tuesday that the authority “will not allow the presence of armed militia who carry out acts which harm the interests of Palestinians and achieve nothing from Israel except a few dead here and there.”

Palestinian Justice Minister Freih abu Medeen, in an interview broadcast by the Palestinian Authority’s radio station, also said the authority will demand that all weapons be licensed. He said the arrests of militants and trials in the military courts will continue “until the roots of disorder have been uprooted.”

His pronouncements were welcomed by Israeli Environment Minister Yossi Sarid, who is deeply involved in negotiations with the Palestinians. Sarid told Israel Radio that Israel will be able to conclude its negotiations with the Palestinians on withdrawing its troops from West Bank population centers by the target date of July 1 if Arafat continues his current campaign.

But Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, while welcoming the steps taken since Sunday, said that Israel wants Arafat to do more.

“I cannot say that the Palestinian Authority does enough, but I can say that there are some signs which are positive,” Beilin said.

Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath told Israel Radio on Tuesday: “We have a commitment to stop and fight every attempt of people to shoot and destroy the peace process.”

In what some Palestinian observers said was an ominous sign, some Hamas and Islamic Jihad supporters reportedly resisted arrest when Palestinian security forces hunted them down in Gaza City on Monday night, with shots being exchanged.

Brig. Gen. Moussa Arafat, chief of intelligence for the authority, also told reporters that someone tried to assassinate him Sunday night after the suicide bombing attacks near the Jewish settlements of Netzarim and Kfar Darom.

Hamas has previously threatened to kill the intelligence head, who is no relation to the PLO chairman.

In the Israeli town of Beersheba on Tuesday, the organs of an American killed in one of Sunday’s attacks were transplanted into eight Israeli patients.

American student Alisa M. Flatow, 20, was riding on an Israeli bus Sunday near the isolated settlement of Kfar Darom when a suicide bomber from Islamic Jihad detonated several dozen pounds of explosives alongside the bus. Shrapnel pierced her skull, and she was declared brain dead Monday.

Her father, Stephen Flatow, “said his daughter loved Israel and had considered settling here and it was fitting that she could help others in Israel,” Dr. Allan Fisher told reporters at Beersheba’s Soroka Hospital. Alisa Flatow had been studying at a Jerusalem yeshiva, or religious school. Her heart, lungs, kidneys and other organs were transplanted Tuesday into the Israeli patients, some of whom had waited years for transplants, Fisher said.

There were wire reports that a third American, identified as Kesari Ruza from California, also had been injured in the Kfar Darom attack. The U.S. Embassy said Tuesday that no such person had been treated after the attack and that Ruza may have simply accompanied Chavi Levine, a friend of Alisa Flatow’s who sustained minor injuries in the attack, to the hospital.

Ruza and Levine left Israel on Tuesday, according to Ingrid Barzel, a U.S. consular official in Tel Aviv. Barzel said she could not confirm that Ruza was from California.