Palestinians Arrest 4 Officers in Alleged Plot

Palestinian security forces have arrested four police officers, including a police chief whom Israel accused of heading a squad that planned to attack Jewish settlers, officials said Sunday.

The Israeli government claims to have evidence that the Palestinian agents have already attacked Israeli soldiers and police officers, and that they were operating under orders from one of the top Palestinian police commanders in the Gaza Strip, Brig. Gen. Ghazi Jabali.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat set up a commission to investigate the allegations after Gen. Ami Ayalon, the head of the Israeli secret service agency Shin Bet, gave him intelligence reports gathered from four other Palestinian police officers who have been in Israeli custody since last week.

The case threatens to derail new U.S. and European efforts to restart stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. U.S. officials reportedly are floating a proposal to go straight to so-called final-status negotiations, while the Europeans are trying to arrange a meeting between Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy in Brussels this week.

A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the arrests were “encouraging” but added that the government was withholding judgment until the results of Arafat’s probe are known.

“The problem is not the arrest of a few soldiers. It is that this goes up to the highest echelon of the Palestinian police,” said the spokesman, David Bar-Illan.

On Sunday, as Netanyahu focused much of his weekly Cabinet meeting on the police case, the government press office released a 35-page report evaluating Israeli and Palestinian compliance with the 6-month-old agreement to redeploy Israeli troops in the West Bank city of Hebron.

According to the Netanyahu government’s assessment, Israel has fulfilled “all of its commitments” while the Palestinians have violated most of theirs, particularly with regard to security cooperation. The report appeared to be part of a new Israeli drive to counter what the government believes is an Arab propaganda campaign against Israel in the United Nations and world media.

Peace negotiations came to a halt in March after Israel began work on a new Jewish neighborhood in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem on a hill that Israelis call Har Homa and Palestinians call Jabal Abu Ghneim.

President Clinton said this month that he was examining options for restarting talks. While nothing has been put on the table formally, the U.S. apparently is proposing that Israel freeze work on Har Homa and other settlement expansion and that the Palestinians agree to delay further Israeli troop withdrawals in the West Bank while the two sides engage in stepped-up final-status negotiations.

“It’s nothing official, but this does exist. It is being bandied about,” an Israeli official said. “They would get the freeze and we would circumvent a further redeployment.”

Netanyahu apparently has not responded to the ideas, and the source said that, if the Palestinians did not act on the alleged police ring, “that would derail any initiative.”

Palestinian officials have denied the existence of a high-level police plot to attack Israelis, but Arafat has given the investigating commission power to interrogate anyone suspected of involvement in the case.

Palestinian officials said Sunday that they had detained Col. Jihad Musami, the police chief in the West Bank city of Nablus; his assistant, Col. Nafez Musmar; and at least two others from Nablus. Israel says Musami, acting on orders from Brig. Gen. Jabali, supplied weapons that could not be traced back to the police forces and sent out squads to shoot at Israelis.

The four Palestinian police officers arrested last week were said by Israel to have been planning such attacks on the Jewish settlement of Har Bracha.

Musami charged last week that the Israelis had fabricated the plot as a pretense to arrest Palestinian police officers who they believed were going to arrest Palestinian collaborators with Israel.

Netanyahu told his Cabinet on Sunday that the plot showed “a clear violation” of peace agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said the alleged Palestinian plot signaled “a dangerous turning point” in the peace process.