TEL AVIV, July 4: In a test of wills over Israel’s reoccupation of the West Bank, two Palestinian mayors said on Thursday they had rejected Israeli moves to undercut Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority by building direct links with their local council.

Palestinian analysts said they expected Israel to maintain its reoccupation for six months, during which Palestinians will try to resist Israeli efforts to undercut the Authority and isolate towns from each other.

But with the welfare of at least 700,000 Palestinians in the re-occupied West Bank cities — where aid groups and Israeli opposition say a humanitarian crisis is looming — in question, the stakes in the faceoff are dangerously high.

The Israelis approached El-Bireh mayor Walid Hamad and Ramallah mayor Ayyub Rabah and “asked us to give them a list of names of municipal street workers and the number of vehicles we have, but we refused,” Hamad said.

Hamad said he had submitted the list to the Palestinian Authority’s ministry of civil affairs, which is authorized to deal with the Israelis, but said the Israelis had refused to deal with the ministry.

“They want to deal with us directly,” he said.

Both Israeli officials and Palestinian analysts said the re-occupation could drag on until Palestinian elections are held in January.

Israel, Palestinian analyst Ali Jarbawi said, is trying to undercut the Palestinian Authority in order to oust Arafat and obtain a more pliant leadership, but will stop short of reviving the military administration of the territories.

Instead it wants to administer security in the territories, which means granting permits to control the movement of Palestinians from one town to another on the West Bank, but this will meet with resistance, Jarbawi said.

“You will see pockets of resistance coming through in the next few months,” predicted Jarbawi, a political scientist at Bir Zeit University.

Palestinian information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo insisted Palestinians would “not accept this system, we will resist them.” But he would not say what for the resistance would take.

Israel has insisted it does not want to re-establish the civil administration of the West Bank that it ran before the 1993 Oslo peace accords and the establishment of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.

But it has said it wants to bypass the authority, which it says is steeped in corruption and hopelessly compromised by links to hardliners who have persisted in their attacks on Israeli targets.

“If the occupation goes on for months and months, the work of the council will be very badly affected,” said Hamad, saying that garbage workers had been detained during regular Israeli curfews.

“If the Israelis stay for a long time the garbage is going to pile up.”

He added that people had been unable to pay their rents and taxes during the occupation, crippling the council’s finances.

Rabah said the occupation had already halted all municipal projects, such as road improvement and building.

But he said: “We will never deal with Israelis, even if they stay more than six months.”

Ranaan Gissin, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said on Monday the Israeli government was preparing ways to improve the lot of Palestinians in the West Bank, now under de facto Israeli control.

The government is “in contact with donor countries and relief agencies” in order to deliver aid to the Palestinians through Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank, Gissin said.

posts destroyed: Israeli troops on Thursday pushed their way into a village near Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip and destroyed two Palestinian security positions and a house, Palestinian witnesses and security sources told AFP.

Two bulldozers and two tanks moved dozens of meters into Palestinian-controlled territory around Abassa village and destroyed the two positions, one of which was a large building, they said.

After razing the two posts, the bulldozers destroyed a house and then began razing land.

Bush plan: Syria appeared to tone down its rejection of US President George W. Bush’s vision of Middle East peacemaking on Thursday, saying that Bush’s keynote speech on the issue had positive points, but they were “scattered”.

“The positive points in the speech were scattered and require great efforts to put them together and give them form,” Foreign Minister Farouq al-Shara told reporters in Damascus.—AFP/Reuters