‘Day of Rage’ Looms as Truce Falters

Israel pulled back tanks from Palestinian towns Thursday morning and an uneasy quiet descended on the West Bank as Israelis and Palestinians agreed to a cease-fire.

By late afternoon, however, the shaky truce was falling apart, just as three others worked out by the security forces on both sides in the past week had collapsed. And both sides were girding for what Palestinians promised would be a “Day of Rage” today.

There were no large-scale clashes between troops and Palestinians, as there have been every day in the last week. But in the Gaza Strip, Israeli troops shot and killed a 26-year-old Palestinian who had tried to tear an Israeli flag from an army post at the Netzarim junction, and they injured 10 others. After nightfall, a Palestinian was shot to death by Israeli troops on a West Bank road just outside Jerusalem after Molotov cocktails were thrown at Israeli cars.

There also were scattered reports of stone-throwing incidents and of gunfire trained on Israeli army positions and Jewish settlements in both the West Bank and Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak expressed a pessimistic outlook.

“I’m not a man of good news,” he said at a memorial service for paratroopers killed in previous wars. “I’m not convinced that this time we have a partner for peace. But it is our duty, our will and the will of the fallen to clarify this to the very end.”

Barak spoke after returning from Paris and U.S.-mediated talks with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat that failed to produce a formal cease-fire.

Although both leaders ordered their forces to disengage, the Paris talks collapsed over Arafat’s insistence on an international committee of inquiry into the high number of Palestinian casualties in the riots, which began Sept. 28 after hawkish Israeli politician Ariel Sharon visited the site of two venerated mosques in Jerusalem’s Old City. By Palestinian count, nearly 60 Palestinians have been killed and about 2,000 injured since then, many of them by gunfire.

After Arafat refused to initial a cease-fire agreement, Barak refused to attend a summit with the Palestinian leader in Egypt on Thursday. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had hoped to preside over a signing ceremony for the agreement at the seaside resort of Sharm el Sheik.

Instead, Mubarak met with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Arafat.

In Washington, President Clinton urged the Israelis and Palestinians to keep negotiating.

“The most important thing is to stop the killing and the dying and the violence,” Clinton told reporters in the White House Rose Garden. “The next most important thing is to get on with the peace process.”

But in Israel, talk turned to giving up on peace negotiations with the Palestinians and forming a united front to cope with what many politicians are calling a national state of emergency.

Political leaders inside and outside Barak’s center-left Labor Party urged him to join with the right-wing Likud Party in a government of national unity.

“All political disagreements between right and left, coalition and opposition, Likud and Labor, must be set aside,” said Silvan Shalom, a Likud member of the parliament, or Knesset. “The backing and support must be complete and absolute for the army, police, security services and also for the prime minister, if this government does the right thing.”

The Israeli army said it was bracing for widespread disturbances today, which has already been declared a “Day of Rage” by Hamas, the militant Islamic movement that violently rejects Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, and by Arafat’s Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Hamas issued leaflets calling on Muslims to demonstrate and attack Israeli soldiers and settlers after noon prayers today, the Muslim Sabbath.

“We are planning a big show tomorrow,” said Maged al Masri, commander of a Palestinian militia in the West Bank city of Nablus, where it was quiet Thursday for the first time in a week.

The Israeli army said it was trying to avoid confrontation by pulling its forces back to the positions they occupied before the riots broke out.

“The guiding principle is to see but not be seen,” Col. Yossi Adiri, commander of Israeli forces near Nablus, told Israel Radio.

Nablus is ruled by Palestinians, but Israel controls a Jewish holy site there, Joseph’s Tomb, where Jews study and pray. The tomb has come under heavy attack daily from Palestinians. One Israeli soldier was shot at the tomb earlier this week and bled to death before the army could rescue him.

Also Thursday, the U.S. announced temporary closure of all its embassies in the Middle East, from Morocco to Oman, over the next three or four days because of “concern that there will be violent demonstrations and reaction to the trouble” in Israel and the Palestinian-controlled areas, a senior Clinton administration official said.

Washington took the precautionary step because of calls throughout the region for demonstrations after prayers today.

Demonstrations have already taken place against American embassies or consulates in Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Syria, the administration reported Thursday.

Meanwhile, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, who was suspended last month for alleged security violations, is back on duty. Indyk had returned to Israel from Washington to be with his family for the Jewish holy days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur when the violence erupted. Albright then decided that there were some tasks he “could usefully perform that would not be a contradiction with the investigation,” a State Department official said Thursday.

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Times staff writers Marjorie Miller in Sharm el Sheik, Tracy Wilkinson in Nablus and Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.