END OF THE INTIFADA

Amnesty Reflects Fatah's Lost Faith in Fighting - Harvey Morris
For Amjad Khalami, the Palestinian uprising is over. The 35-year-old emerged from five years in hiding at the weekend and gave himself up at the Palestinian security headquarters in Bethlehem to take advantage of an Israeli amnesty for wanted men. Armed resistance was, in effect, broken in 2002 when Israel reoccupied the West Bank in Operation Defensive Shield. Since then, the gunmen have concentrated on avoiding capture.

Soul-searching Fatah officials have begun to acknowledge that the armed intifada was a mistake and even to claim that Islamist extremists in Hamas pose a greater threat than the Israeli occupation. Muhammad Laham, a PA and PLO legislator who served 14 years of a 30-year sentence for his activities in the first intifada, says, "It was a mistake to militarize the intifada."

"I am a secularist. I didn't spend 14 years in an Israeli jail to see the creation of a Taliban regime in Palestine," he added. (Financial Times-UK)