Word: fatah
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...with any enthusiasm among Palestinian legislators for his autocratic rule than with some of the key political issues that divide Arafat from his challenger. Abu Mazen has made clear that he intends to put Palestinian security services to work disarming the various unofficial militias, such as the Fatah-based Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, and also to clamp down on the militant Islamist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Arafat opposes the idea of confronting the militants, for fear that this could lead to a Palestinian civil war. But Abu Mazen has long maintained that the armed intifada is a dead...
...Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has been trying to sideline his old enemy since taking office three years ago; not the Bush administration, which made clear last summer that sidelining Arafat is an essential condition for renewing the peace process; and not even many Palestinian leaders from his own Fatah faction, who have spent much of the past year working to break the aging Arafat's personal monopoly on power. And yet, as Wednesday's deadline approaches for Palestinian prime minister-designate Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) to present his cabinet for ratification by Arafat and the Palestinian legislature...
MIDDLE EAST One Step Forward ... A host of Palestinian groups met in Cairo for talks on ending attacks against Israel. Yasser Arafat's secular Fatah faction endorsed a proposed truce, but Hamas and Islamic Jihad rejected it. The need for a cease-fire was apparent in Gaza, where a Palestinian teen died in a gun battle after the Israeli army raided the town of Beit Hanoun. Troops also blew up bridges in reply to rocket attacks on the nearby Israeli town of Sderot. In the West Bank, Israel bulldozed more than 60 Palestinian shops near Tulkarem. Israeli officials said...
...Arafat condemned the latest attack, but his political injunctions against killing civilians inside Israel have had little impact in recent months. The latest bombings were perpetrated by members of a militia based in his own Fatah movement, and were carried out even as Palestinian and Egyptian leaders meeting in Cairo were engaged in tough negotiations around a pact to end attacks inside Israel, so as to avoid stampeding Israeli voters to the right...
...officials instead. Hamas responded by pulling back its top man, Khaled Meshaal. Even the limited progress reported at the meeting was condemned in a communique issued in Gaza by Hamas and Islamic Jihad--joined, significantly, by the Ahmed Abu Reesh Brigades and the Salahuddin Brigades, both splinter militias of Fatah. --By Matt Rees and Jamil Hamad