Israel Suspends West Bank Pullback : Mideast: 24-hour halt in redeployment follows kidnaping incident by Fatah faction.

Israel’s army suspended its troop redeployment in the West Bank for 24 hours Thursday after gunmen from PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction freed two Israeli border policemen they had kidnaped and held overnight.

The incident in the West Bank town of Janin kept high-level teams of Israelis and Palestinians working through the night to avoid a breakdown in the complex security arrangements being made as part of Israel’s military pullback in the region.

Israeli and Palestinian security officials blamed each other for the confrontation. The Palestinians accused Israel of failing to coordinate their movements with them, and the Israelis blamed the Palestinians for failing to disarm groups who are operating outside the framework of the police force.

In the end it took Arafat’s direct order to the Black Panthers, a group of armed Fatah loyalists, to win the freedom of the border policemen the Panthers had kidnaped.

In a later incident, a riot erupted in the West Bank city of Nablus, which Israeli troops are scheduled to leave in less than three weeks. Israeli troopers were pelted with stones by thousands of youths marching in a rally commemorating the sixth anniversary of deaths of four Black Panthers there.

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According to Palestinian and Israeli reports, troops opened fire on the marchers with rubber bullets, tear gas and then live ammunition. The Nablus hospital reported 18 people injured, two seriously.

Both Israeli and Palestinian officials said such incidents are to be expected during a period when Israeli control of the West Bank’s towns and villages is receding and the Palestinian Authority is taking over.

“This problem is that we are doing something very special, very unique,” said Yossi Beilin, the Israeli Cabinet minister responsible for peace negotiations. “I think and hope that we are mature enough and experienced enough to deal with it.”

Beilin said that the government will not ignore the kidnaping in Janin, but he said that it also will not let the incident slow the troop pullback.

The army called the Janin incident “extremely serious.” It stopped the deployment of Palestinian police from Jericho into the northern West Bank for the day and imposed a closure on Janin.

Arafat spokesman Marwan Kanafani said that Prime Minister Shimon Peres will hold a meeting soon with Arafat to go over security arrangements in the West Bank in the wake of the Janin incident.

Israel began pulling its troops out of the northern West Bank last month; it is expected to complete its withdrawal from most towns and villages by the end of the year.

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Both sides are anxious to demonstrate that their complex agreement, which divides security responsibilities between the Israeli army and the Palestinian police, is workable.

But for several hours it looked as though the arrangements might fail in their first major test.

About 8 p.m. Wednesday, an undercover Israeli unit entered the West Bank town of Qabatiyeh to arrest Samir Zakarneh, a member of the Black Panther militia, whom Israel suspects of killing Palestinian collaborators. Although Israeli troops have pulled out of Qabatiyeh, they remain responsible for “overall security” there under an agreement with the PLO.

Zakarneh, 25, was serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison for murdering a collaborator in Qabatiyeh at the start of the intifada, the Palestinian rebellion against the Israeli occupation. He was released after Israel and the PLO signed their framework peace accord in September, 1993. Israeli sources said he had resumed his attacks on collaborators in the Janin area in recent months.

When troops tried to surround him Wednesday night, Zakarneh reportedly fled into a coffee shop--where patrons helped bar the door--and refused to come out, even when tear gas canisters were fired inside by troops. Hundreds of Qabatiyeh residents flocked to the scene, according to Israeli and Palestinian reports, and began to pelt the Israeli troops with rocks and bottles.

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Friends of Zakarneh then reportedly stopped a car driven by two border policemen in nearby Janin and took them hostage, saying they would release them only if Zakarneh were allowed to go free.

Negotiations among the Panthers, the Palestinian police and the Israelis dragged on through the night and into the early hours of Thursday before a deal was struck.

Israel allowed officers of the Palestinian Authority’s security service to take Zakarneh from the coffee shop, place him under arrest and return him to Jericho, where he was supposed to live after his release from prison. The Israeli border policemen were handed over to Palestinian police in Janin with their weapons and then returned to Israeli officials. Israel Radio reported that four Panthers involved in the kidnaping were arrested by the Palestinian security service.

Col. Jibril Rajoub, the head of the Palestinian security service in Jericho, said the Israeli raid in Qabatiyeh “was not innocent.”

“The Israelis are responsible for overall security,” he contended, “but if they don’t want to blow up the situation, they should have informed us that they wanted Zakarneh back in Jericho. Without the coordination that took place in the end, there would have been bloodshed. The situation was very tense.”