Worldandnation: Militants' halt yields Gaza retreat

JERUSALEM - Israeli troops turned over security control of part of the Gaza Strip to Palestinian police early today, after Palestinian militants on Sunday declared a conditional halt to suicide bombings and other attacks on Israelis.

Together, the two developments raised hopes that both sides had reached a major turning point after 33 months of bloodshed.

The cease-fire and the Israeli withdrawal came at a time of heightened U.S. attention to Middle East peace efforts. The Arabs proclaimed their cease-fire while U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was in Israel pressing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to work with Palestinian moderates on the White House-backed "road map" to peace.

As a first step, negotiators for Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, agreed to turn policing in much of Gaza over to armed Palestinian Authority police. Palestinian and Israeli commanders began mapping the turnover Sunday night, and Israel withdrew its troops and tanks from the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun early today.

In exchange, Israel said it was insisting that Palestinian security forces intercept would-be attackers and resume Israeli-Palestinian intelligence sharing to stop the terrorists.

Under the disengagement agreement, small communities of Israelis will remain in their fence-ringed Jewish settlements in Gaza, protected by Israeli troops. Palestinian forces, perhaps in joint patrols with Israelis, will get back control of the roadways linking the crammed coastal strip of 1.2-million Arabs, which were returned to Palestinian control by the 1993 Oslo accords.

But the cease-fire is fragile. After weeks of negotiations with the government of newly appointed Palestinian Prime Minster Mahmoud Abbas, the three Palestinian militant groups - the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade - declared a moratorium Sunday on killing Israelis anywhere, including soldiers and Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The three organizations are responsible for all but one of the 55 suicide bombings that have killed Israelis during the Palestinian uprising, which began in September 2000.

In a last-minute glitch, militants from al-Aqsa - the military wing of Fatah, the political party of Abbas and top leader Yasser Arafat - released a statement blasting the truce and the negotiations that led up to it, saying that no one had consulted them about the cease-fire. In the end, al-Aqsa agreed Sunday night to a six-month cease-fire, while Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad agreed to a three-month moratorium.

But another radical Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, came out against the truce.

- Information from Knight Ridder Newspapers and the Washington Post was used in this report.

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