Hamas threatens Arafat with war

YASSER ARAFAT confronted the grim prospect of war with Palestinian militants as the Hamas Islamic organisation threatened to turn its guns on the police of his Palestinian Authority. At the same time Mr Arafat accused the Islamic movement's spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, of fostering attacks on Israel.

In a leaflet faxed to the media, Izzedin al Qassem, the Hamas military wing, told Mr Arafat that last week's arrests of Hamas activists was propelling Palestinians towards civil war. "The Palestinian Authority's ... repressive techniques and its insistence on hitting the sons of Hamas and the Qassem brigades may push many of the sons of Hamas and its military wing ... to direct their war and guns ... against the [Palestinian] Authority's security apparatus."

On the other side of the barricade, Mr Arafat denounced Sheikh Yassin for "supporting terrorist activities".

Three days after the wheelchair-bound preacher was put under house arrest, Mr Arafat said his police had found weapons in his home in Gaza City and had detained three gunmen hiding there.

The Hamas communique is an ominous escalation in the confrontation between Mr Arafat and Palestinian militants. Until now, Hamas refrained from provoking the Palestinian police while Mr Arafat tried to integrate Hamas's political wing into mainstream Palestinian politics. He has resisted Israeli demands to condemn small-scale attacks by Hamas on settlers in the West Bank.

But now that Israel has agreed to withdraw from another 13 per cent of West Bank territory, co-existence is crumbling. Thirteen months ago, when Sheikh Yassin returned after eight years in an Israeli prison, Mr Arafat welcomed him as a hero. Now he appears to be branding him as a terrorist.

Mr Arafat was quick to denounce Thursday's suicide bomb attempt on a settler school bus and to follow up his condemnation with arrests.

At the same time the Palestinian Cabinet endorsed the agreement on Israeli withdrawal, brokered at Wye in the US. The Cabinet is expected to present its plans for combating anti-Israeli violence to the US this week. That will spur Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to bring the Washington agreement to his Cabinet for ratification.

He is trying to appease right-wing critics who have threatened to topple his government in protest at the agreement. With his authorisation, settlers yesterday fenced in the site of another contentious Jewish housing project on the West bank, within Ras el Amud, an Arab village in east Jerusalem.

Work also began yesterday on the first two of a network of West Bank bypasses which will serve Jewish settlements on the West Bank that will be isolated when the Israeli army withdraws.

On a weekend when Israel marked the third anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, his Labour predecessor, Mr Netanyahu said: "We are not continuing on the path of the Labour government." The 1993 Oslo agreement, he said, was a bad agreement. His aim at the Wye talks was to "limit the damage".