Jail Breakout Said to Split Arafat, Aide

In a sign that Israeli military and diplomatic pressure is opening fissures in the Palestinian leadership, Yasser Arafat reportedly denounced his West Bank security chief, Col. Jibril Rajoub, during a violent argument Tuesday.

Palestinian sources described what appeared to be a serious rupture in relations between Arafat and one of his top officials. The Israeli military claims that the Palestinian Authority president’s ability to control militias and even his own security forces is weakening.

Arafat lashed out at Rajoub after the colonel’s officers did nothing to stop a mob in Hebron that freed 17 prisoners from the West Bank city’s jail Monday night, sources close to Rajoub said. The mob broke down the jailhouse doors and helped inmates escape after Israel launched airstrikes on a Gaza City security compound.

The Hebron breakout, captured on video by television news crews, embarrassed Arafat, who has been trying to convince the Bush administration and the European Union that he is cracking down on gunmen, said the sources, who requested anonymity.

Relations between Arafat and Rajoub have been strained recently by policy disagreements and by comments from some Israeli officials that they would like to see Rajoub replace Arafat.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government has declared Arafat “irrelevant” and refuses to deal with him. Israeli tanks have confined the Palestinian leader to Ramallah in the West Bank for more than two months as Israel has chipped away at the infrastructure of his regime.

Israel Aims to Weaken Arafat’s Hold on Power

As it has sought to weaken Arafat’s grip on power, Israel has increasingly targeted the many security forces that underpin his government. Israeli airplanes and attack helicopters have destroyed Palestinian police headquarters, jails and other security structures. Dozens of Palestinian police and security officers have died in the air raids, and more have been killed in clashes with Israeli troops.

Israel says it has struck Palestinian security forces when they have been involved in attacks on Israelis or have failed to prevent attacks. It also holds Arafat responsible for the attacks, even when they are carried out by groups opposed to the Palestinian Authority, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Israel says it will continue to hit Arafat’s security buildings until he takes strong measures against militants.

The pressure on Palestinian security forces has had the side effect of eroding the rule of law in Palestinian-controlled territories, where citizens say they can no longer count on the police to investigate crimes or capture criminals.

“The police spend most of their time trying to protect themselves these days,” said Said Zeedani, director of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights, a human rights group based in Ramallah.

From his office window, Zeedani can see Palestinian policemen sitting under the olive trees outside their offices in a converted apartment building they moved to after Israel destroyed their station. The officers are too frightened to work in the building, which they expect will eventually be targeted by the Israelis, he said. So they park their cars far away and sit on chairs under the trees.

Similar scenes can be found throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Security officers balance case files on their laps while sitting outside buildings they fear might be hit.

As a result, even egregious violations of public order are going unchecked by security services in the Palestinian-controlled territories, Zeedani said.

Most recently, a mob of about 200 from the Kalandiyeh refugee camp rioted on Ramallah’s Main Street for four hours Jan. 31. The rioters burned shops and homes belonging to the family of a man suspected of killing a Kalandiyeh resident with whom he had fought after their cars collided. Police did not intervene, Zeedani and witnesses said.

Vigilante Justice Reportedly on Rise

Arafat formed a committee to look into the matter, but no arrests have been made. Neither has anyone been arrested in the killing of three prisoners by enraged rioters who stormed a makeshift courthouse in the West Bank town of Jenin last month. The mob killed the three men, who had been convicted of murdering a security officer, because they thought the men’s sentences were too light. In that case, police tried to protect the prisoners--whose case could not be heard in a courtroom because the court building had been destroyed in an Israeli airstrike--but the mob overwhelmed the officers.

Such instances of vigilante justice are mounting, Palestinians say, as the Palestinian Authority’s ability to enforce law and order wanes.

Israeli strikes against jails have made it hard for the Palestinian Authority to justify to its public the sort of arrest campaign that Israelis, the Bush administration and others are demanding, Palestinian officials say. In recent weeks, several gunmen have stormed prisons to free detainees they say are at risk of being killed in Israeli air raids. The mobs rarely encounter resistance from security officers.

“As long as Israel bombards our security forces and our jails and our civilian facilities, we are not committed to keep any prisoner in our prisons,” Rajoub’s counterpart in the Gaza Strip, Col. Mohammed Dahlan, said in an interview printed Tuesday in Al Quds, a Palestinian newspaper published in mostly Arab East Jerusalem.

“If Sharon kills and bombards our headquarters and our jails and assassinates our cadres, then we will not keep anyone hostage to become the victims of the Israeli bombardments,” Dahlan said.

Rajoub, who heads the powerful Preventive Security Apparatus, is thought to have been pushing Arafat for months to rein in militants and quell the Palestinian revolt in favor of a return to negotiations with Israel. But Tuesday, Arafat accused him of failing to order his men to defend the Hebron jail because the southern West Bank town is Rajoub’s birthplace and power base.

Arafat grew so angry during their exchange that he waved his gun in Rajoub’s face, the sources close to Rajoub said. Alarmed by the confrontation, senior Palestinian officials were said to be serving as mediators between the two men Tuesday night. Neither Arafat nor Rajoub could be reached for comment.

Rajoub has long been a controversial figure in the West Bank. A onetime militant who spent years in Israeli prisons, he has built close relations with Israeli security officials since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994. His elaborate headquarters in Ramallah have remained untouched by Israeli airstrikes and incursions, and he has kept his several-thousand-strong force out of the fighting that has raged since September 2000.

But Rajoub has also repeatedly insisted that he is an Arafat loyalist who has no intention of replacing the Palestinian leader.