"Maybe this is the first message from all those Israeli-Palestinian security arrangements agreed at the Wye Plantation," he said. "It must have been set off by someone high up in a building."There are plenty of high windows on the Eastern Boulevard, and Mr Majzoub's old Volvo still lies in two parts outside his apartment, the rear end draped over a fence. "Today, you see, is the third anniversary of the Israeli assassination of our leader, Fathi Shkaki." On the face of it, Mahmoud Majzoub, his wife, Nuha, and 18-month-old son, Hussein - all Lebanese - fared better than the Palestinian leader of Islamic Jihad, who was murdered by a Mossad death squad in Malta in 1995, gunned down outside his hotel by two men on a motorcycle.Mr Majzoub, a comparatively junior official in the radical pro-Palestinian movement in Sidon, was with his family just 20ft from his car when it was torn in half by 3kg of explosives, burning their faces and arms and hurling them across the road "It was remote controlled," another of the bearded men said. The bearded men in the Sidon hospital room - indeed all the bearded young men in the corridor outside - took much the same view.

"We are Islamic Jihad and Israel is our only enemy and Israel alone did this," a tall man in a blue T-shirt said, his eyes staring at the foreign reporter who had dared to enter the room. "Arafat made peace with the traitors and he will pay for what he did to my son," she said. Mr Tamari believes the only principled course is to persevere in the face of these twin pressures. "You have to put up with people who say you are a Don Quixote.". UM MAHMOUD, white-scarved and angry, looked up at me from her son's bedside. The protest was highly effective, but viewed with the deepest suspicion by the Palestinian leadership in Gaza.Many local Palestinian leaders, however, have given up, squeezed out by an all-powerful Israeli state and the authoritarian impulses of their own leadership.

Television crews from around the world clambered to hear them. This settlement will sever the link between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and is part of an Israeli policy of encir- cling the Jewish city withsettlements.Salah al-Tamari and Feisal Husseini, the Palestinian leader in Jerusalem, set up a protest camp on a rain-swept hilltop next to Har Homa, where they conducted a non-stop press conference for days. Mr Arafat, however, is suspicious of grassroot leaders and their ability to mobilise people. He has always seen a Palestinian state as being created from the top down.These different approaches were apparent last year when Israel began building a settlement of 6,500 houses at Har Homa, called Jebel Abi Ghneim by Palestinians. Earlier this year, the Palestinian leader offered to make Mr Tamari a cabinet minister to buy him off.Mr Tamari has a strong local base, is self-confident and experienced.

"We seemed to be saying that the days of hardship are over."He is critical of the modern Palestinian ambition to have "a big bank account, a villa and a Mercedes". Ordinary Palestinians have seen their standard of living slashed by 30 per cent in recent years, so Mr Tamari's attacks are levelled at the corruption and high living of the Palestinian leadership.Elected by a large majority to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 1995, Mr Tamari walks a fine line between organising resistance to the expansion of Israeli settlements around Bethlehem and criticising Mr Arafat's Palestinian Authority.Mr Arafat and his men make a point of ignoring the Palestinian parliament. During the 1982 Israeli invasion, he was held for a year in Sidon.In 1994 he returned to Bethlehem under the terms of the Oslo accords. He is critical of the agreement, saying "not that it was just, but that it produced less injustice"."It gave our people the wrong message," he says. Our shepherds have nowhere to graze their flocks," he says. At 55, with much of his life spent in exile, Mr Tamari has adopted a philosophy of endurance and resistance. It is the fruit of a life spent resisting injustice, be it Israeli or, in recent months, at the hands of the proto-state being created on the West Bank by Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader.Born into a family which traditionally provides the leadership for the Tamari, a Bedouin tribe long settled in the area, he left to study in Cairo in 1963.Expelled from Jordan in 1971 (he is married to a former wife of King Hussein), he became a leader in Fatah, Mr Arafat's political movement, in Lebanon. SALAH AL-TAMARI, the hawk-faced leader of the Palestinians in Bethlehem, stands on his office balcony and points to the Israeli settlements crowning the hills around the town like siege camps: "Sometimes I think we are going back not just to pre-Oslo days, but to pre-Camp David." Israel has recently established a new settlement near his home village of Zaatara, near Bethlehem: "Next they will build a bypass which will slice through the village Already they have bulldozed several houses nearby.

The dead boy, Wasim al-Tarifi, 16, belonged to a prominent local family.In an attempt to defuse the dispute, a Palestinian military court in Jericho has already jailed four Palestinian military policemen for attacking the headquarters of Fatah in Ramallah This is unlikely to satisfy the family of the dead boy.. Israeli Government claims that the Palestinians are already reneging on the deal is further embittering the atmosphere.Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, returned home to Gaza yesterday to face unexpected troubles within his own camp following the killing of a member of his organisation, Fatah, by Palestinian military intelligence in Ramallah on Sunday. The Israeli press says the real reason is that he is not sure he can get the support of a majority of his cabinet. However, several ministers who were wavering have come out in favour of the plan.Last night the Israeli leader was due to address a meeting of the central committee of his Likud, which is normally packed with his supporters.The United States is trying to put a brave face on Mr Netanyahu's postponement of the vote in his cabinet, saying Washington expects both Israel and the Palestinians to start implementing the Wye agreement from Monday. Mr Rabin was almost unguarded when he was shot dead after a peace rally by Yigal Amir, a religious nationalist student.In the tense political atmosphere in the wake of the agreement at the Wye summit last week in Maryland, Mr Netanyahu has decided against putting the deal to his cabinet, saying he must first see the Palestinians' promised security plan. Noam Federman, a far-right leader, said: "There are those who say revenge should be left to God, but it is not God's work but ours."Despite fears that the religious right will try to kill Mr Netanyahu, such an attack would be far more difficult to carry out today because of improvements in security. "I don't sleep at night, ever since I heard the cries of 'traitor' directed at Netanyahu," the Israeli officer in charge of guarding VIPs, but whose identity is secret, was quoted as saying.