Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said his people should drop their weapons in the struggle for a state, marking out a clear change of strategy for peace with Israel after Yasser Arafat’s death last month.Abbas, near certain to win a Jan. 9 election to succeed Arafat, made the comments in an interview published on Tuesday, two days after militants showed their muscle with the deadliest attack on Israeli troops since May. Fresh violence killed a Palestinian policeman and a Thai farmer at a Jewish settlement.Abbas, a US-favoured veteran leader had previously shown his opposition to armed attacks in a 4-year-old uprising, but not in such strong terms since Arafat’s death on Nov. 11.‘‘The uprising should be kept away from arms because it is a legitimate right of the people to express their rejection of the occupation by popular and social means,” Abbas told the pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat newspaper. ‘‘The use of arms has been damaging and should end,’’ said Abbas, who took over as head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation after Arafat’s death.Despite Abbas’s stance, growing violence in the occupied Gaza Strip has dampened hopes of a peace breakthrough after Arafat’s death. Israel ordered more efforts to target militants after an attack that killed five Israeli troops on Sunday. ‘‘We will continue this fight against terror until someone else fights the terror,’’ Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz told reporters, alluding to the Palestinian Authority.On Tuesday, witnesses said Israeli troops killed a Palestinian policeman in Rafah, a flashpoint town on the Gaza-Egypt border, and wounded another. Military sources said troops fired at gunmen seen crawling toward the border fence. At the Jewish settlement of Ganei Tal in central Gaza, mortar shells killed a Thai farm-hand and wounded two others, military sources said. Hamas claimed credit for the barrage.Violence in Gaza has soared ahead of a planned Israeli pullout next year from the territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war, but the latest bloodshed has also sent a strong message to Abbas and other new Palestinian leaders. The idea of giving up weapons was dismissed by Hamas, which joined with a group from Abbas’s own dominant Fatah faction to launch Sunday’s attack.Earlier Israeli troops blew up seven homes inthe Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis. —Reuters
