Palestinians locked in power struggle

Palestinian leaders were today locked in a power struggle triggered by Yasser Arafat’s attempt to hand control over all the security forces to a loyalist in apparent hope of sidelining the US-backed Palestinian security chief, officials said.

The current security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, is supported by Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, whom Arafat has repeatedly tried to undermine since appointing him in April under US pressure.

International mediators now want Arafat to relinquish control of the security forces and allow Abbas and Dahlan to clamp down on militants, in response to a Hamas bus bombing that killed 21 people in Jerusalem last week.

Arafat continues to command several of the security branches, while Abbas and Dahlan supervise the rest.

Instead of giving up control over armed men, Arafat yesterday proposed that supreme command should pass to Nasser Yousef, a staunch Arafat loyalist.

Such an appointment would effectively sideline Dahlan.

Palestinian militants, meanwhile, fired a new, longer-range rocket into Israel today, the Israeli army said.

The rocket, which landed less than half-a-mile from the Israeli city of Ashkelon, fell on a beach, just 10 yards from an unmanned lifeguard post, the army said.

The militants fired the rocket from an area of the Gaza Strip that allowed them to target Ashkelon, rather than the much smaller Israeli town of Sderot, which had previously been the target of Qassam rockets, the army said.

The rocket was fired just hours after Dahlan’s forces yesterday began arresting weapons smugglers in the Gaza Strip, seizing weapons and detaining at least a dozen suspects.

Dahlan’s forces also sealed off two tunnels used to smuggle weapons from Egypt to the Gaza Strip.

A Palestinian official said that if Yousef was appointed interior minister, Dahlan would become irrelevant.

If Yousef were to take over, Arafat would retain effective control over the security forces – which the Americans and Israelis oppose.

But the official said he doubted the initiative would be approved by the central committee of the ruling Fatah faction.

A meeting of the committee scheduled for later today was cancelled for reasons that remained unclear.

A main Palestinian obligation, according to a US-backed peace initiative, is to dismantle militant groups.

Yousef, who is one of the oldest members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, was part of a senior guard who spent the 1980s in exile with Arafat in Tunis and Lebanon.

In 1994, when the Palestinian Authority was established, Yousef was a senior police commander.

Palestinian Information Minister Nabil Amr denied Israeli media reports that Dahlan and Abbas were threatening to resign.

“There is a small crisis now about how we will strengthen the unity of our security forces ... and how the Palestinians will enforce the willingness of the authority and the rule of law,” Amr told Israel’s Army Radio.

“We want to unify our security forces under one title, under one address.”