Mideast leaders launch fresh talks

How much support this one event has among Palestinians is debatable. Security sources in Jenin said that after the dramatic turn of events in Jenin, renegade members of the Al-Aqsa Brigades, which were supposed to disarm this summer, were engaged in gun battles with the PA. Members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad decried the events as cooperation with the occupation. Many Palestinians complained that the Israeli army is still making deadly incursions into Jenin, despite promises to stop.

But Suleiman Akkid, a major in the Palestinian security forces, said that cooperation with Israel has recently begun to function in a way it hasn't in many years. "Palestinian police in Jenin are involved in intelligence sharing with the Israeli army," Major Akkid says. "When there is a security incident inside Jenin, we notify the Israelis, and when the Israelis carry out a mission, they notify us as well." He also said that Palestinian police were once again being permitted to patrol in areas that they'd been promised under the Oslo Accords.

Gershom Baskin, co-director the Israeli-Palestinian Center for Research and Information, says that improved coordination is key things to political progress. "One thing that enables progress was the extremely serious way in which the Palestinians were dealing with security cooperation," he says. But many Palestinians, he warns, believe that the "amnesty agreement," in which Israel agreed not to seek the arrest of militants from the Fatah-affiliated Al-Aqsa Brigades, is breaking down as the Israeli army continues to seek men still on their "wanted" list.

Ghassan Khatib, head of the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center (JMCC), says Palestinians are upset at the lack of improvements in daily life, such as in removing checkpoints and easing travel restrictions. "We Palestinians have learned to judge things on a practical basis," he says. "When we look at practices on the ground, we don't see change. While these [summit] meetings seem to give the impression the situation is improving, there's a disconnect between the reality and the image."

Earlier this week, the JMCC announced following its first poll since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip that almost half of the Palestinian public, or 46.7 percent, believes that the situation in Gaza worsened following the Hamas coup, while a slight majority, or 35.4 percent, says the situation in the West Bank improved after Abbas's formation of a temporary "caretaker" government headed by Salam Fayyad, who serves as prime minister, foreign minister, and finance minister.

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