Abbas Quits in Setback to Peace Plan

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas abruptly resigned Saturday after only four months in office, plunging the faltering U.S.-backed Mideast peace initiative into deeper disarray and leaving a potentially dangerous power vacuum in the Palestinian leadership.

Fueling a sense of chaos in the hours after Abbas announced that he was calling it quits, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of the militant group Hamas, barely escaped with his life when an Israeli jet bombed a building in Gaza City where the group’s leaders were meeting. Yassin was slightly wounded, Hamas associates said.

Volatile Gaza had already been simmering with anger over the deaths of a dozen Islamic militants over the last three weeks. Israeli military sources said they launched the attack Saturday because it was an opportunity to eliminate the remaining leadership of Hamas.

Hamas vowed revenge. “Our reaction will be on a different scale than anything Israel has seen before,” the group’s military wing said in a statement.

The collapse of Abbas’ government is a blow to both Israel and the United States, which had viewed him as a good-faith partner in peace negotiations as well as a counterbalance to the pervasive influence of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Almost immediately after Abbas announced his resignation in a speech at a closed session of the Palestinian legislature, Israel declared that it would have no dealings with any new Palestinian government that was dominated directly or indirectly by Arafat.

“Israel will not accept a situation where control of the Palestinian Authority is returned to Arafat or anyone who does his bidding,” Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in a statement.

Several top Israeli officials renewed their calls to expel Arafat from the Palestinian territories. Sharon and Arafat have been sworn enemies for much of their adult lives, but even so, the Israeli prime minister has been unwilling to risk the consequences of expelling the Palestinian Authority leader.

Analysts have predicted that such a move would spark widespread riots by Palestinians who revere Arafat as a symbol of their struggle for statehood. They also say Israel would incur international opprobrium by expelling an elected leader whose legitimacy is recognized by most governments around the world, although not by the United States and Israel.

Israel also worries that a globe-trotting Arafat could prove to be a far more disruptive force than he has been during nearly two years of confinement in his shell-pocked headquarters in the city of Ramallah.

In Washington, the Bush administration said that the appointment of Abbas had been a turning point for the Palestinian Authority and that the White House remained committed to the peace plan, or “road map.”

It called on all sides to “consider carefully the consequences of their actions.”

“We hope the Palestinian legislature will continue to act in a way that empowers the prime minister to fight terror and bring a better way of life to the Palestinian people,” the White House said in a statement.

“The prime minister must be supported by a Cabinet committed to fighting terror, political reform, and rooting out corruption.”

The Bush administration and Sharon have for many months sought to isolate Arafat diplomatically but received the latest rebuff last week from the European Union, which refused to abandon contacts with him.

Arafat accepted the resignation in typically oblique fashion -- perhaps in an attempt to distance himself from having played a role in the prime minister’s ouster.

In an encounter that lasted only 10 minutes, Arafat summoned lawmakers, top officials and members of his Fatah faction to his headquarters Saturday evening and read Abbas’ letter of resignation. Then, according to several officials who were present, he turned to government ministers and told them: “You are the caretaker Cabinet now.”

Although this left some puzzled as to whether Abbas’ departure had been formalized, Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath told reporters: “This implicitly means [Arafat] has accepted the resignation.”

For Abbas, it was a hard, fast fall. Scarcely three months ago, the prime minister stood on a sunny Jordanian beach, shoulder to shoulder with President Bush and Sharon, to endorse the initiative known as the “road map,” which laid out steps by both sides meant to lead to Palestinian statehood.

But little had gone right for Abbas since then.

As his tenure grew increasingly stormy, he repeatedly threatened to quit. This time, a running battle with Arafat over control of the Palestinian security forces and increasing virulent domestic opposition to his government pushed him to follow through.

Unpopular from the start, Abbas saw his street credibility drop precipitously as the perception grew among his people that he was too conciliatory toward Israel.

Palestinians grew restive as the peace plan did little to improve their daily lives.

Already, there was speculation over who might succeed Abbas in what the prime minister had called “an almost impossible mission.”

Likely candidates included Ahmed Korei, the Palestinian parliament speaker; Shaath, the foreign minister; and Salam Fayyad, the finance minister and a favorite of the Bush administration.

During Abbas’ time in office, Korei and Shaath -- both veteran politicians who have known Arafat for decades -- managed to lend the prime minister a degree of support but were also extremely careful not to alienate Arafat.

The Palestinian Authority president sent a signal that he might already have picked a favorite. He emerged from the meeting at his compound hand in hand with Munib Masri, a wealthy businessman who until now has largely stayed on the margins of Palestinian political life. But Masri told reporters later that he had not been chosen as Abbas’ successor.

Senior Palestinian officials insisted that the transition of power would be an orderly one. Under government rules, Arafat has two weeks to name a successor to Abbas, but some predicted that the process would move ahead much more quickly. Fatah’s policymaking Central Committee was to meet today, Palestinian officials said.

Arafat could ask Abbas to return -- and indeed, as it became clear that the resignation was imminent, some Palestinian officials speculated that it could be a feint by the prime minister to hang on to his job.

But several associates said that even if Arafat attempted to draw his rival back into the government, it was unlikely that the proud, prickly Abbas -- humiliated by months of wrangling and said to be feeling personally threatened by the public vitriol directed at him -- would agree.

“The man has simply had enough,” lawmaker Azmi Shuaybi said. “He was tired of everyone calling him names. And he knew that if it had come to a vote of confidence, he would have lost.”

In his speech Saturday to lawmakers -- whose support he had sought in an address only two days earlier -- Abbas “talked in a sad way about all the obstacles that had been placed before him,” said lawmaker Hassan Khreisheh, an opponent of Arafat. “And when he came to the end, no one was crying or begging him to stay. He saw this.”

Abbas left the parliament building immediately after his speech without speaking to journalists and was not present at the evening meeting at Arafat’s headquarters. The two men reportedly have not spoken for two weeks.

In a token of the sometimes petty enmity between the two, Arafat was reported to have been extremely upset by the fact that Abbas sent an emissary -- Yasser Abed-Rabbo, the minister for Cabinet affairs -- to deliver the resignation letter, rather than presenting it himself.

Israeli officials said they expected the political disarray to bog down efforts to revive the peace plan, but senior Palestinian leaders insisted that need not be the case.

The plan was left in tatters by a descent into violence in recent weeks, most notably a bus bombing in Jerusalem on Aug. 19 that killed 22 people, including the bomber. Hamas claimed responsibility for the bombing. Israel launched reprisal raids in several West Bank cities.

“The road map is not dead, and no party should use these events as an excuse to drop this work,” said Saeb Erekat, who was recently renamed to the post of chief Palestinian negotiator. “We have a crisis, but we also have a caretaker government that can deal with matters at hand.”

Others, though, worried that any successor to Abbas will face similar woes.

“We lost a good prime minister,” said lawmaker Mohammed Khourani. “I hope we don’t have the same problem again -- we must not ask the impossible of anyone, and not immediately.”

Across the political spectrum, Palestinians blamed Israel and, to a lesser extent, the United States, for Abbas’ resignation.

“The main factor in the failure of this government was the policies of Sharon, who has continued to attack Palestinians in every way,” said Abed-Rabbo, the Cabinet minister. “That is what undermined this government.”

Israeli officials retort that Abbas squandered time, momentum and goodwill by trying to negotiate with militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, rather than moving to dismantle terror infrastructure as the peace plan mandates.

Israel’s strike Saturday against the Hamas leadership marked the first time it had targeted the ailing Yassin, who is an immensely popular figure in Gaza, even among Palestinians who do not support Hamas.

Israeli security sources said a warplane dropped a 550-pound bomb on a building in the heart of Gaza City where Yassin and several other top Hamas leaders were meeting.

Bodyguards carried Yassin, who is in his mid-60s, nearly blind and uses a wheelchair, to safety, witnesses said. Fifteen bystanders were hurt, according to hospital officials. Hamas swiftly vowed revenge, with its military wing declaring: “We will hit the enemy everywhere, and by all means.”