Palestinian Police

JERUSALEM -- Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed yesterday to speed up negotiations on expanding Palestinian self-rule throughout the West Bank, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said Israel will ease its closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.The reported progress comes one week after a summit between Mr. Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat produced nothing more than mutual recriminations about the deadlock in their negotiations.After last week's session, Israeli and Palestinian commentators were declaring the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord dead and predicting the collapse of Mr. Rabin's government.

JERUSALEM - Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said yesterday he was close to persuading Palestinian militant groups to stop their attacks on Israelis, while Israel suggested it would curtail military operations in the Gaza Strip if militants held their fire. Abbas said in an interview on Palestinian television that he expected to have a truce in hand "very soon," after days of recent meetings with militant groups in the Gaza Strip. "We can say that there has been significant progress in the talks.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli tanks shelled two Palestinian police posts in the West Bank yesterday, killing a police officer, and then briefly seized a portion of Nablus in an escalation of violence that further threatens a practically stillborn truce. As many as a dozen tank shells fell on the Palestinian police station and a border checkpoint on the north and south sides of Nablus, the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank. The action was in retaliation for an attack on a Jewish settler family that left a man, his wife and a year-old boy injured.

GAZA CITY, Gaza -- Struggling to rescue itself from its deepest crisis, the Palestinian self-rule government arranged a temporary truce yesterday with Islamic militants and agreed to investigate street battles between police officers and protesters Friday that killed at least 13 people and wounded as many as 200.Unlike the day before, Gaza City's streets did not echo with gunfire for long hours yesterday, although shots were occasionally heard. Both the Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat and the dominant Muslim group, Hamas, sought to pull back from the brink of what some here fear could become a civil war.Whether their truce amounted to more than a one-day lull in the fighting remained to be seen.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Gaza's director of tourism, Moain Sadeq, still recalls the last tourists to visit the Gaza Strip. It was September 2000, and a group of 30 Israeli scholars had come to see Gaza's archaeological sites, including the remains of an early Bronze Age walled city near Gaza's commercial center. Sadeq, an archaeologist by profession, guided the curious, somewhat nervous visitors through the excavations of mud brick walls, giving him hope that someday the site would be added to the list of must-sees for travelers to the Holy Land.

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Nasi Sayid offered up the keys to his taxi while he dawdled over a falafel sandwich."Here, you can take the taxi. I can go nowhere with it," said Mr. Sayid. He was one of more than a million Palestinians confined by Israel's crackdown after four terrorist bombings that have left 60 people dead in Israel since Feb. 25.Soldiers kept Palestinians from entering or leaving 465 West Bank towns and villages yesterday, as Israeli and Palestinian police continued to arrest hundreds of people suspected of having ties to radical Islamic fundamentalist groups.

NABLUS, West Bank - The sun shines bright, yet the blinds are drawn in Ghassan Shakah's office. He has been the mayor of this Palestinian city for a decade, and now he is living in fear. A bodyguard stands at his door. Instead of a television or a computer on his desk, Shakah has a security monitor to keep an eye on the corridors of City Hall. His black Mercedes is bullet-proof. Nablus, a city of 250,000 that sprawls through a valley in the Samarian Hills and seemed destined to become the commercial capital of the northern West Bank, has descended into chaos.

JERUSALEM -- Hundreds of Palestinian protesters battled Palestinian police yesterday in Gaza in a deadly showdown that could undermine Yasser Arafat's attempts to dismantle extremist groups and stave off further Israeli military strikes. Waves of stone-throwing demonstrators converged twice in 12 hours on the house of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound spiritual leader of the militant Hamas organization, after the Palestinian leader placed him under house arrest. One man was killed shortly after midnight, and the situation remained tense throughout yesterday afternoon.

GAZA, Gaza Strip -- The two men on the flickering videotape nervously confessed to their captors. For more than two hours, they told how they had killed and kidnapped and conspired against their fellow Palestinians on behalf of Israel.Sweating and fidgeting, the men told their Hamas interrogators: "We deserve to be killed because we are traitors." Shortly after, they were shot to death.The tape of the "confession" of the two Palestinian collaborators, obtained by The Sun, is a chilling account of a little explored aspect of the Palestinian uprising against Israel.

JERUSALEM -- From Ramallah last month, photographs emerged that could serve as a tragic modern addendum to the exhibit "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" on display this year at the Historical Society in New York City. That controversial exhibition unflinchingly documented decades of barbaric lynching widespread in the United States from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. A warning sign outside the display room cautioned that the explicit material might be disturbing to young people.