6 Teens Buried as Palestinians Halt Infighting

Gazans seethed with rage Saturday over the slaying of six Palestinian teenagers by Palestinian security forces, even as an agreement between Islamic militants and Yasser Arafat’s government ensured that their funerals passed peacefully.

Separate, low-key burials were held for the young men Saturday. The six were killed when firefights erupted Friday in the Jabaliya refugee camp between police and mourners during a funeral for an activist with the militant group Islamic Jihad who had been shot dead the day before by Palestinian police.

Police stayed clear of Saturday’s funerals, and thousands of mourners kept their guns out of sight and gave police stations a wide berth during most of the processions. When one march did pass close to a police building, mourners formed a human chain as a buffer between demonstrators in the crowd and police officers.

Tension was further defused when the militant group Hamas and the Palestinian Authority agreed that the authority would abandon its efforts to arrest Abdulaziz Rantisi, a senior Hamas political figure, if he would stop giving interviews to journalists and confine himself to his house. Clashes erupted last week outside Rantisi’s home when police tried to arrest him and were confronted by hundreds of Hamas supporters.

The authority reinforced its order by cutting the talkative Rantisi’s home telephone line and blocking his cell phone. He apologetically turned journalists away Saturday, explaining that Hamas’ spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who is himself under house arrest, had pleaded with Rantisi to help calm the situation.

Late Saturday, the Palestinian police said that they had arrested two senior Islamic Jihad military operatives in Gaza. The two were identified as Shadi Mohana and Mahmoud Judeh.

The moves came amid growing fears among Palestinians that Israeli pressure on Arafat to crack down on militants might lead to civil war. In a televised speech last Sunday, the Palestinian Authority president called on Palestinians to observe a cease-fire with Israel. He vowed that his security forces would arrest violators. Clashes between his security forces and Palestinian militants since then have left seven people dead and more than 100 wounded.

Arafat has won an agreement from Hamas, which with Islamic Jihad has carried out a string of suicide bombings inside Israel, to halt those attacks for now. Hamas issued a statement to that effect Friday night, and Islamic Jihad said it is considering following suit.

“The situation is so critical,” said one analyst close to Hamas, who spoke on condition that he not be identified. “Our people are dealing with the [Palestinian] police as with Israeli soldiers in the first intifada.” Hamas, the analyst said, is determined to prevent any widening of the split between it and the Palestinian Authority.

Arafat has relied on the same sort of compromises to resolve previous conflicts with the Islamic militants, who reject the 1993 Oslo peace accords he signed with Israel and have challenged his regime since its inception in 1994. But it is unclear that such a deal this time will stave off Israeli attacks on the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority.

Israel and the Bush administration signaled that they expect Arafat to continue a crackdown on militants, with officials of both governments rejecting the Hamas declaration of a suspension of attacks inside Israel as inadequate.

“I realize they’ve said they won’t conduct suicide bombings. That has to lead to the conclusion that maybe someday they’ll say they will. The point is that the Palestinian Authority needs to make sure that they can’t,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters in Washington.

In Jerusalem, Israeli officials said Israel makes no distinction between attacks inside its pre-1967 borders and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Communications Minister Tsippi Livni said Israel will continue its assassinations of key militants, which she called an act of self-defense.

Early today, Israel banned Arafat from attending Christmas Eve services in Bethlehem this year. But Arafat told the Associated Press that he intends to make his annual Christmas visit to the traditional birthplace of Jesus with or without approval from Israel.

In the frigid courtyard outside her concrete home in Jabaliya, Intissar Radwan cared nothing of the day’s political maneuvers. She spent Saturday burying her 13-year-old son, Habib, one of the six killed by Palestinian security officers Friday.

“My son was a good boy, the best sort of boy,” Radwan said as she sat surrounded by angry, weeping women at Habib’s wake in the refugee camp where mother and son were born. “What did he do to deserve to be killed? What sort of authority shoots its own people?”

The Palestinian security men who shot at demonstrators Friday, said one of the mourning women, who declined to give her name, “are spies--they are not Arabs. The Jews gave them the bullets to shoot our men. Abu Ammar [Arafat’s nom de guerre] wants to satisfy the Jews.”

Demonstrators who clashed with police in Jabaliya on Friday threw rocks at a crude portrait of Arafat painted on the wall surrounding the police station they were attacking. His decision to crack down on Islamic militants is seen here as an outrage, an attack on men many Palestinians view as heroes in the struggle against Israel.

As mourners gathered under a tent pitched outside the Radwan family home Saturday, Habib’s friends said they had expected him to die young--as they themselves expect to die young--but in confrontations with Israelis, not with Palestinians. They displayed little grief, however, over his death.

“He has gone to a better place,” said 13-year-old Nada Sultan, who said he had known Habib since they were both small boys and had played soccer with him in the dirt alley outside their homes shortly before his death. “He has gone to God.”