Militants increase support for Abbas

JERUSALEM -- Mahmoud Abbas, the leading candidate for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority in next Sunday's elections, appears to be winning support of a key constituency: Palestinian militants and their supporters.

Abbas received a tumultuous welcome yesterday in the Rafah refugee camp, which has been one of the most violence-plagued corners of the Gaza Strip throughout the more than four years of the current Palestinian uprising.

In an incongruous but increasingly familiar campaign scenario, black-clad militants armed with assault rifles hoisted the candidate, clad in his usual sober business suit, onto their shoulders and paraded him before a cheering crowd.

So many supporters jammed the rundown wedding hall where he spoke that Abbas had to climb out a window when it was time to leave.

The 69-year-old front-runner, commonly known as Abu Mazen, had been given a similar reception two days earlier in the restive Jenin refugee camp, where a troop of gunmen led by one of the West Bank's most wanted men, Zakaria Zubeidi, demonstrated their enthusiasm for his candidacy by firing into the air.

Although the militants' support is boosting the popular standing of Abbas and helping set the stage for the kind of decisive mandate that observers believe he must win if he is to exercise power effectively, the candidate is also walking a tightrope.

As one of the first Palestinian politicians to publicly urge a halt to the armed uprising against Israel, his credentials as a moderate are considered solid. But images of Abbas being embraced by gunmen, as well as the fiery stump speeches he has delivered, are causing stirrings of unease on the Israeli side.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has given senior lieutenants strict orders to refrain from commenting on the Palestinian electoral campaign.

Israel wishes to neither undermine Abbas by overtly expressing support for him, nor to engage in mudslinging against a not-yet-elected leader.

Abbas has not retreated from his position that the Palestinians should look to nonviolent means of achieving their goal of statehood.

But in speech after speech, he has taken an unyielding political line: Israel must withdraw from all of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, territory seized in the 1967 Middle East war.

He sounded that call again yesterday in Rafah, a war-battered slum of about 80,000 people only a few yards from the Egyptian border that has been the scene of unrelenting fighting between Palestinian militants and Israeli troops.