TEL AVIV, Israel, April 26 (UPI) -- Top army officers warn Palestinian militants are preparing to resume hostilities, possibly after Israel withdraws form the Gaza Strip and parts of the northern West Bank.
Outgoing military Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon issued the warning in a speech last week in Herzliya, and military intelligence chiefs discussed it in briefings to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
The pullback from Gaza is expected to begin mid-August. The evacuation of Jewish settlers there will take three weeks to a month after which the defense establishment will take a few weeks to remove infrastructure and the army's installations.
In an interview in Tel Aviv this week, a senior military source told United Press International the militant Palestinian groups' leaders and operational commanders assume the calming-down period -- or tahadiyah in Arabic -- will not last long. The army's rules stipulate the source may not be identified by name or title.
The source noted that in talks in Cairo, militants committed themselves to maintain quiet in 2005, but their plans say they must prepare for the day after. Members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and of Fatah's Shuhada al-Aksa "whose commitments (to quiet) are conditional," want to resume fighting, the source said.
Their leaders are holding back though they too believe eventually there will be "an explosion." Meanwhile, the groups are arming, recruiting, training and planning for the next round of fighting, the senior officer said.
Thousands of guns, including Kalashnikovs assault rifles and handguns, are smuggled from Egypt into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Prices have dropped, indicating some of the demand has been met. Other weapons include rocket-propelled grenades, explosives, anti-tank rockets and probably Strella anti-aircraft missiles, the source said.
Some go to the Gaza Strip and some are smuggled across Israel's Negev desert to the West Bank. They are sold to individual Palestinian or to groups that store them. Hamas has its own smuggling system, the officer said.
Egypt and the Palestinian Authority are making "a greater effort that in the past" to stop the traffic but are not doing all they can, he said. They know who the smugglers are but instead of going after them, they try to seal the tunnels that pass under the narrow Israeli strip at the southern edge of Gaza Strip. In some cases, the Israelis and Palestinians have cooperated in sealing the tunnels, the source confirmed.
According to his account, some smugglers previously worked for Palestinian security organizations and have contacts with their old colleagues. There are understandings what they may smuggle and some arms reach the Palestinian Authority.
In some instances, Israel provided the Palestinian Authority with the smugglers' names.
"They promised to take care of it and I have not seen that done," the source said.
Instead, Palestinian security officials warned smugglers the Israelis were on their trail, he said. The Egyptians, too, "could do much more to stop the smuggling. They know the smugglers quite well," he added.
The second major Palestinian militant effort is directed at developing rockets that can hit the Israeli town of Ashkelon, north of the Gaza Strip. The town of 100,000 people is near strategic sites such as fuel tanks and an electric power plant.
Palestinian rockets now have a range of 5.6 miles and since militants cannot fire from the Israeli-controlled boundary line, they are working to extend the rockets' range and conduct "very many" tests firing into the sea, the source said.
Some workshops in Gaza produce the shell casings and pipes, small laboratories provide explosives and at other sites Palestinians put it all together. The aim is to produce high-trajectory weapons in the West Bank as well to overcome Israel's security barrier - 95 percent fence, 5 percent wall - which has drastically curtailed the Palestinians' ability to infiltrate Israel. West Bank militants have failed in almost all their rocket-launching efforts partly because the Israelis foiled them, the source said.
Palestinian organizations are "investing heavily" in recruiting and training fighters. There are some 50,000 to 60,000 men in the Palestinian Authority's security forces, and more than 1,000 militants who "are committed to the (political) organization to which they belong," he said.
The source would not estimate the militant organizations' size but said: "If there are thousands (of people there) then there are few thousands." Their goal is not only to challenge Israel but also the Palestinian Authority "if it will threaten Hamas or the Islamic Jihad."
Recruits are trained in or near towns and individual fighters are given target practice with tin cans serving as targets, the source said.
Meanwhile militants are preparing attacks that will be launched when "it is time to come out of the closet." They are gathering intelligence for attacks, preparing the means and people for the strikes, the source said.
(Earlier this month the Shabak security service reported the arrest of 21-year-old Palestinian student Wassam Badoui Salah Nasser, of Nablus, who allegedly had a global-positioning system device hidden in his car's dashboard. He used it to pinpoint army bases and checkpoints in the Nablus area and sent the information over the Internet to his Hezbollah handlers in Lebanon.)
The military source said the Palestinian Authority is reluctant to confront the militants. The general policy is "not to arrest Palestinians who want to attack Israel," and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas maintains he is too weak to take them on.
Abbas dismissed some officers after militants fired at his Muqataa headquarters in Ramallah, but did nothing to armed Fatah men who dispersed a party meeting in Ramallah nor against Special Forces men who entered Ramallah Sunday, opened fire and smashed windows protesting the fact their commander was not appointed to a position he wanted.
Several days ago, Hamas wanted to "punish" an "immodest woman" in Beit Lahia, in the Gaza Strip. "Their intelligence was wrong and they killed an innocent girl," the source said. There, too, nothing was done to the militants, he added.
Official Palestinian forces lack will and some commanders ignore orders they don't like, the senior officer said.
Last weekend, the Palestinian Authority merged 11 security arms into three, removed what a "layer" of commanders, and retired some 1,000-2,000 veterans. These changes increase the chances there will no longer be "private camps of commanders, (each commander) with his own army."
"The idea is that the new commanders will be indebted to the Palestinian Authority and will try to advance the authority's interests. Will it succeed? I don't know. We support it. We wish it well. I doubt whether it will really succeed," he said.
In the meantime the tahadiyah will continue, he predicted.
Everybody has an interest in quiet until after elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council and the Israeli pullback.
Hamas realizes ordinary Palestinians are tired of fighting and knows it must exercise restraint in order to win the July elections. It did not participate in the presidential elections that Fatah's Abbas won, but in subsequent local elections made great strides. It is not clear how the parliamentary elections will end.
The source said he did not believe the Islamic movement would negotiate with the Jewish state if it wins, since it denies Israel's existence, let alone its right to exist. Negotiations would signal recognition of Israel's existence, the senior officer noted.
