WORLD REPORT PROFILE : Daniela Karim Khalaf : THE RADIO VOICE OF PALESTINE : Daughter of the late Ramallah mayor has known tragedy and privilege. On air, she lectures, empathizes and fields questions from her listeners.

The voice sounds silky smooth and much older than its owner as it greets Palestinians at 9 a.m., six days a week. “Palestine, good morning,” Daniela Karim Khalaf says soothingly.

After offering a handful of comforting homilies to her listeners--”Begin your day with a smile”--Karim Khalaf gets down to business.

“The lines are open, and we’re waiting for your phone calls,” invites the 25-year-old host, speaking in Arabic.

For the next two hours, Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and even inside Israel take advantage of the first opportunity they’ve ever had to tell their troubles live, on the air, to other Palestinians.

During her program, Karim Khalaf fields complaints about garbage collection on the West Bank, arrogant ministers in Yasser Arafat’s governing Palestinian Authority, the lack of jobs for young people and the treatment of women in the workplace.

Her technique is a mixture of a sympathetic ear and with sharp lectures to listeners to take responsibility for their lives.

“I tell them, ‘If you see garbage, pick it up,’ and at the same time I talk to the ministers about why there are not more pickups,” Karim Khalaf said in an interview.

She is a daughter of privilege and tragedy, a passionate believer in the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accord that granted limited self-rule to the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho.

“We really believe that we have to enhance peace,” Karim Khalaf said of herself and the staff. “We have a message, and that message is that we are trying to build the state and that this is the chance of a lifetime. OK, there are a lot of problems with this agreement we made with the Israelis. But this is the chance of a lifetime, and there is a small ray of hope that it will work.

“I tell my callers that I am the daughter of a martyr,” Karim Khalaf said, “that the Jews killed my father and that I want to make peace.”

Her father, Karim Khalaf, was mayor of the West Bank town of Ramallah in 1980 when militant Jewish settlers planted bombs in his car and the car of Bassam Shaka, mayor of Nablus. Shaka lost both his legs. Khalaf lost his right leg. Three years later, he died from what his family believes were complications from the injury and the stress of several years under house or town arrest in Jericho, where he had moved.

Daniela Karim Khalaf was 11 years old and living in Houston with her mother, Tarazeh Karim Khalaf, when her father was flown to Houston Medical Center for treatment after the attack. “Daniela was always by his side,” her mother recalled. “He was a strong-willed man--Daniela gets that from him.”

Both her family history and her phone calls to ministers and bureaucrats make Karim Khalaf’s talk show popular, and controversial. At any time during a show, she can put a call through to some startled bureaucrat and relay on the air the complaints leveled against his or her ministry.

It is a sort of populist accountability that is familiar to Americans and unheard of among Palestinians living in areas that for 27 years were under Israeli occupation.

“It is the first time in our history that the Palestinians can speak without censorship to radio or to any mass media organ about their daily problems,” said Nabil Khatib, a professor of journalism at Birzeit University in the West Bank. “In the past, we didn’t have Palestinian radio, and most Palestinians weren’t comfortable talking to Israeli Radio about their problems.”

Karim Khalaf makes no apologies for an upbeat approach at a time when many Palestinians believe that their troubled peace accord with Israel may be unraveling and when many complain that the Palestinian Authority is a disappointment.

“The theme of our program is that we Palestinians are in a building stage,” the broadcaster said. “We want people to build their state, to go out to work for it, to not wait for others to do what has to be done.”

“Good Morning, Palestine” and Karim Khalaf are a hit, perhaps the only hit that the refashioned Voice of Palestine--once the revolutionary radio station of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s guerrilla war against Israel--can claim since it relocated to Jericho last year.

It has been a year of shoestring budgets and painful content readjustment for the tiny staff in the three-story private home that houses the studio. Staffers have not been paid for 10 months. There are no commercial advertisements.

Karim Khalaf, a graduate in television broadcasting from American University in Cairo, walked into the station on July 3 to interview a newscaster for a television station that the Palestinian Authority has yet to get off the ground.

“I passed through the radio station on the way to the interview,” she recalled. “They said, ‘Why don’t you try reading the news?’ I went live that day with a news bulletin. When I said, ‘This is the Voice of Palestine,’ I really felt it. It was an important moment for me.”

In January, she took over “Good Morning Palestine,” which was launched in December.

Voice of Palestine has been accused of being a mouthpiece for Arafat, of engaging in heavy self-censorship, of shutting out voices opposed to the Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty.

Khatib, the journalism professor, still gives the station low marks for its news broadcasts, and he says the professional quality of many of the shows--including “Good Morning, Palestine”--is poor.

“But that is beside the point,” he said. “After the Palestinian Authority was established, there was no trust among Palestinians that there would be democracy here. But there is a democratic nucleus in this show. . . .”

Slowly, spurred on by a combination of vision and of competition from Israel Radio in Arabic and Radio Monte Carlo, which broadcasts in Arabic from Europe, the Voice of Palestine is trying to make itself credible.

“There is a very big difference between our radio station now and the way that it was abroad,” station director Bassem abu Sumaya said. “Abroad it was revolutionary radio. Our speech now is different. It is speech for peace.”

When Voice of Palestine was broadcasting from Tunisia, Lebanon or Algeria, Abu Sumaya said, it was on the air about two hours a day. Now it broadcasts from Jericho 18 hours a day, seven of those live. Making the decision to go live with a call-in show that would let people say whatever they thought about the Palestinian Authority was not politically easy, said Bassam Doughlas, program director.

“We decided to go for live shows for two reasons,” he said. “One was for the democracy of live broadcast. The other was to save money.”

Karim Khalaf says she does not know how much longer she can keep working the 12- to 14-hour days, six days a week, that it takes to both host the show and read several news bulletins a day. But she has no doubts about the importance of the work.

“Palestinians have to invest here,” Karim Khalaf said. “I don’t preach, I don’t teach, but I do try to communicate. Having the Israelis gone from Jericho does make a difference in our lives. When I see my flag flying up high over Jericho, I see that my father’s blood was not wasted.”

Times researcher Summer Assad contributed to this report.