Renewed clashes break out; Israeli found dead in Palestinian area

JERUSALEM - Israeli troops drove back Palestinian stone throwers with rubber-coated bullets and tear gas at chronic trouble spots in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, wounding more than 50 Palestinians Saturday.

The clashes included at least a dozen shooting attacks on Israeli soldiers and a homemade bomb hurled at a border police patrol, the military command said. But no one was killed Saturday, one of the few such days since the violence first erupted exactly a month ago.

Fighting between Israelis and Palestinians has left 133 dead and thousands wounded, the vast majority Palestinians. The Israeli military has predicted that the unrest could go on for months more.

Ibrahim Hawamdi, a young Palestinian man watching the clashes in the West Bank town of Ramallah, agreed that Palestinian frustrations were still running high. But the uprising was taking a heavy economic toll on the Palestinians, many of whom haven't been able to travel to jobs in Israel, he added.

''People want to go back to work; they're running out of money,'' Hawamdi said. More than 100,000 Palestinians work in Israel.

Elsewhere, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat called for a ''political separation'' from Israel but said he would reject any geographic or economic division. With Mideast peace talks on hold because of the fighting, both the Israelis and Palestinians have raised the possibility of taking unilateral action.

Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak called Cabinet ministers to his residence Saturday night to discuss Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami's trip to Paris and Washington next week.

Barak also spoke by telephone with Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah II of Jordan, reiterating that he wanted an end to violence as a precondition for resuming peace talks, Israel Television reported.

Some Palestinians have called for a declaration of statehood next month while the Israelis have been assessing a ''unilateral separation'' that could include staking out borders and placing strict limits on the number of Palestinian workers in Israel.

The Palestinians strongly oppose any one-sided action by Israel, and Arafat's comments suggested he was leaning away from such moves as well. He said an independent Palestinian state should be established on land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War, Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper reported Saturday.

''We are (for) a political separation that is based on the 1967 border, international resolutions and ... will lead to the setting up of a Palestinian state,'' Arafat was quoted as saying.

Also Saturday, the radical Palestinian group that hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship and killed an American passenger in 1985 declared Saturday that it was resuming attacks on Israel.

''As a result of the enemy's intransigence and the killing of our children, we have to respond to it in the manner it understands,'' Abul Abbas told the Saudi newspaper Asharq al-Awsat.

Abul Abbas, the nom de guerre of Mohammed Abbas, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, said ''how and when we will fight is left to the future.'' The London-based newspaper said he was interviewed by telephone from the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

In Lebanon, the leader of Hezbollah urged Palestinians to move from stone-throwing to suicide missions.

''The most important operations in the confrontation are suicide missions because of their negative material, psychological and moral effect on the enemy and their positive effect on the mujahedeen (holy warriors),'' Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said in a TV interview.

Also Saturday, an Israeli was shot and his body burned near Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority said. The unidentified man was allegedly involved in ''organized crime and drug smuggling,'' and his death was not linked to the current wave of political violence, officials said.

Israel's military said only that the body had been returned to Israeli authorities and that the matter was under investigation. But Israel TV quoted Israeli police officials as saying they had ''reasonable grounds'' to believe the man was lynched in a political killing.

In Saturday's clashes, at least 25 Palestinians were injured in four separate confrontations in the Gaza Strip, among them a 14-year-old boy who was in serious condition after being shot in the head at Rafah, on the southern end of Gaza, doctors said.

In an unusual development, Palestinian police intervened in a protest at the Karni crossing point in Gaza, forcing demonstrators onto trucks and driving them away.