Yasser Arafat

ALGIERS, Algeria -- The Palestine National Council, the ruling congress of the Palestinian movement, was expected to give a qualified "yes" today to participation in an Arab-Israeli peace conference co-sponsored by Washington and Moscow.The Palestinians were the only key players who had not agreed to attend the conference, aimed at ending the four-decade conflict and tentatively planned for next month.Palestine Liberation Organization officials said yesterday that U.S. conditions for Palestinian attendance are still imperfect but that the most recent offers from Secretary of State James A. Baker III showed enough progress for a positive vote.

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas sharpened the war of words against his Hamas rivals yesterday, saying it was time to "bring down" the militant group's regime in the Gaza Strip. Abbas' comments against Hamas, whose fighters defeated his Fatah faction to take control of Gaza five months ago, reflected his anger over a deadly clash in the coastal enclave earlier this week. "We have to bring down this bunch which took over the Gaza Strip by force and which is trading on the suffering and misery of our people," Abbas said in broadcast remarks marking the 19th anniversary of the Palestinian declaration of independence.

WASHINGTON -- Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip will receive pledges of about $2 billion in aid to bolster their economy from more than three dozen countries -- including a multimillion-dollar pledge from Israel -- at an American-organized sponsors' conference in Washington tomorrow, administration officials said yesterday.In the aftermath of the recent agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, Washington organized the 38-nation conference to provide tangible evidence that the accord will improve the lives of the Palestinians in the occupied territories and defuse the attraction of groups like Hamas, the Islamic militant organization.

PRESIDENT YASSER Arafat is talking about a Palestinian prime minister, an appointment he would make after the January 2003 elections and once a Palestinian state is declared. Is that the Yasser Arafat talking? Has the old revolutionary turned dictator come around to the idea that his days of running the Palestinian Authority as a fiefdom won't survive demands for political reform? Don't bet on it. And yet the fact that Mr. Arafat has acknowledged the need for a day-to-day manager to operate a Palestinian state is intriguing.

JERUSALEM - A female Palestinian suicide bomber blew herself up yesterday in Jerusalem, killing herself and two Israeli police officers who had stopped to question her. Authorities credited the officers with saving the lives of dozens of people at the French Hill Junction, a major transit point in the city. They had stopped the bomber before she reached a crowded bus stop. An intensive care nurse at Hadassah Hospital who stood about 20 yards from the explosion described the attacker as a young woman wearing a headscarf, her face partially covered with a veil.

RAMALLAH, West Bank - As a hot afternoon faded into evening yesterday, Yasser Arafat left the confines of his battered compound with an aide and relaxed under a cool breeze. The 74-year-old Palestinian leader was dressed in his usual green fatigues and a checkered headdress. But for more than a year, the avid world traveler has rarely ventured farther than his parking lot. At that very moment yesterday, thousands of miles away, the man with whom Arafat uncomfortably shares power, Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, was in Washington meeting with President Bush in the Oval Office discussing the Middle East peace plan.

In Baltimore yesterday and across the country, Jewish leaders pledged their support to the embattled state of Israel and urged Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to halt the violent demonstrations waged by his people for two weeks. Although they blamed Arafat for the violence, the leaders also called on him to return to the negotiating table to resolve the 51-year-old conflict between his people and Israel. "It was just seven years ago that Israel and the Palestinians embarked upon the path of peacemaking.

The allies reportedly are ready to release 300 Iraqi prisoners of war today following the release of six American, one Italian and three British POWs. Saddam Hussein must be relieved. If 3,000 or 30,000 captured Iraqi soldiers were let go, all in a swoop, the defeated Iraqi dictator would be in even greater trouble than he now is.Every one of the Iraqi POWs in coalition hands (and there are 60,000 of them) is a potential bacillus ready to afflict the Baghdad military regime with a mortal illness.

Probably no one in Israel and the Palestinian territories - not Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, not Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon - has been a more polarizing figure than Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The reaction to his assassination yesterday by the Israeli military was no less polarized. Depending on the speaker, Yassin was remembered as evil incarnate or the embodiment of the Palestinian people, as bringer of darkness or bringer of light.

JERUSALEM -- Cranking up the pressure on the Israeli government, Yasser Arafat repeated warnings yesterday that Palestinians might have to revert to violence if the peace with Israel broke down.In meetings in the West Bank city of Nablus, Arafat invoked the intifada, the Palestinian uprising waged largely by stone-throwing youths that flared in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank for seven years before peace was made in 1993."One of our options is to return to the intifada," Arafat told high school students on the first day of school.