Arafat demotes nephew in Gaza

TEL AVIV — Yasser Arafat demoted his nephew to the No. 2 commander of Palestinian security forces in the Gaza Strip yesterday by rehiring the man he fired two days earlier in a bid to halt an open and bloody revolt against his authority.

Mr. Arafat reinstated Abdel Razek al-Majaide as the Gaza security chief and the new boss of nephew Moussa Arafat, who has a reputation for corruption.

The appointment of the nephew on Saturday had triggered an open revolt, with gunmen from Mr. Arafat’s Fatah party first attacking Moussa Arafat’s Gaza Strip headquarters and then burning down the building.

The latest shuffle among the Palestinian top brass came amid unprecedented domestic criticism of Mr. Arafat for rising anarchy and rampant corruption ahead of a planned Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

In Ramallah, Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia kept pressure on the Palestinian leader, saying he had not decided whether to rescind his 3k-day-old resignation. Mr. Arafat has implored Mr. Qureia to change his mind.

Some Palestinians called the demotion of Moussa Arafat a rare about-face for the Palestinian leader, who finds his powers severely eroded in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank amid four years of conflict with Israel.

“He is backing down in his own way,” said Said Zeedani, a professor at Al Quds University in Jerusalem. Mr. Zeedani said Mr. al-Majaide is not perceived as a crony of the Palestinian leader and has no reputation for corruption.

“Mr. Arafat, on the whole, is responsive to these kinds of pressures. It’s pressures from his own people. It’s not external pressure or from the Palestinian opposition. It’s coming from his own family. He’s trying, as a father figure, to be responsive,” Mr. Zeedani said.

Separately, an Israeli missile strike targeted a house in the Shati refugee camp next to Gaza City, in an apparent attempt to assassinate a top militant from the Popular Resistance Committee, the Associated Press reported.

The attack wounded the militant leader along with two others, according to a spokesman from the Popular Resistance Committee.

Early today, Israeli helicopters fired more missiles at the same house, wounding two more persons, witnesses and hospital workers said.

The house belongs to the commander of the Popular Resistance Committee, an umbrella group of militants who broke away from mainstream Palestinian militias. It has taken responsibility for blowing up several Israeli tanks.

Israel’s attention was diverted away from the Palestinian crisis after the assassination yesterday evening of Tel Aviv District Court Judge Adi Azar.

In the first killing of a judge in Israel’s history, Judge Azar was shot twice in the chest while he was sitting in his car outside his home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat HaSharon.

“I am deeply shocked to the depths of my soul,” Justice Minister Yosef “Tommy” Lapid said, according to the Ha’aretz newspaper’s Web site. “This must give us food for thought about where Israeli society is headed.”

The public soul-searching in Israel stirred up by the assassination was an ironic parallel to the political crisis among the Palestinians.

Officials have complained that the violence and the prime minister’s resignation have embarrassed the Palestinians and shifted worldwide attention away from the recent World Court decision calling Israel’s security barrier illegal.

Columnists in Palestinian newspapers said if Mr. Qureia steps down, it would only compound the confusion. Some suggested that the Palestinian government must re-establish order at home if it plans to press Israel to comply with international law.

A delegation of Palestinian Cabinet members is scheduled to travel from Ramallah to Gaza today in an attempt to further calm the unrest, which started on Friday when two Palestinian police chiefs and four French nationals were taken hostage for several hours and released.

A prominent Israeli analyst said the violence in the Gaza Strip remains relatively limited.

“They’ve learned to contain violence,” said Hillel Frisch at Bar Ilan University in Israel. “On the social level, the big families in Gaza know how to maintain the peace. They’re still far away from a situation like Somalia.”