Foes of PLO-Israel Deal Win West Bank Student Election : Mideast: The vote at Birzeit University reflects growing sentiment in the occupied territories against the accord.

BIR ZEIT, Israeli-Occupied West Bank —  In a stinging defeat for the Palestine Liberation Organization, hard-line opponents of the agreement with Israel on Palestinian self-government swept the student council elections at Birzeit University, traditionally a political barometer, as sentiment against the accord continued to grow in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

With a small but clear margin, an unlikely alliance of the militant Islamic Resistance Movement and two Marxist groups within the PLO took all nine seats on the Birzeit student council. They defeated Fatah, the main PLO group led by Yasser Arafat, and its Communist allies in the Palestine People’s Party.

Opponents of the accord, whose implementation is still under negotiation, saw the Birzeit results as the start of a political rebellion among Palestinians against what they regard as a set of half-measures that should be rejected in favor of a continuation of the armed struggle against the Israeli occupation.

“These results demonstrate the Palestinian people’s rejection of the deal Arafat made with (Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak) Rabin,” said Fakhri Sabbah, the victorious Islamic candidate for council president. “The agreement was wrong in principle, and every day it is being shown to be wrong in practice.”

Khaled Abu Jaber, the defeated Fatah leader on the campus, agreed that the vote reflected a general dissatisfaction with the pace of the negotiations with Israel over implementation of the peace accord and anger over “the absence of changes on the ground.”

But Abu Jaber argued that the election should not be read as a broad referendum. “Birzeit feels everything more acutely and even in advance of the rest of our people, and these results are more a warning to the PLO and to the Israelis that results are needed to bring this agreement to life,” he said. “Otherwise, the Palestinian people will reject it.”

As the results became known, Arafat telephoned Fatah organizers from Athens, where he was visiting, to express his anger. “He wants the results overturned, even if there has to be a riot,” one student leader said. “I don’t think we’ll do that--it’s not a good start for Palestinian democracy.”

But the jubilant winners from Hamas, as the Islamic Resistance Movement is known, celebrated by breaking virtually all the windows in the student council building, where the Fatah supporters had taken refuge.

With an elite student body of 2,700 drawn from throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Birzeit provided much of the leadership of the intifada , the Palestinian rebellion against the Israeli occupation. Elections here are strongly contested and closely watched for political trends.

Last year, a Fatah-led coalition easily won all nine student council seats. This year, it lost each by a small but decisive margin of 4% to 5% after Hamas formed an alliance with two Marxist groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front, on the basis of their mutual rejection of the accord.

An opinion survey by the Center for Palestinian Research and Studies in Nablus had indicated earlier this week that backing for Fatah on the West Bank and Gaza Strip declined over two months from 46% to 41%, while support for Hamas rose from 8% to 15%. Support for the Popular Front had doubled to about 9% since September.

“The bad situation in which we are living is the cause of these election results,” said Hanna Nasser, the Birzeit president and a prominent PLO leader. “Since the agreement was signed more than two months ago, there have been no real changes in the situation of the Palestinian prisoners, of our deportees (in southern Lebanon) or the closure of Jerusalem. So the students made clear with their votes what they think of the deal with Israel.”

The students’ implicit rejection of the agreement was bitterly ironic. Birzeit, as the most prestigious of the dozen Palestinian colleges and universities, had sent more than 30 of its professors to the Middle East peace talks, making up almost half of the Palestinian delegation.

Mohammed Ishtaiyah, Birzeit’s dean of students, said the results should be seen as a serious shift in political opinion but contended they were “in advance of public opinion among Palestinians as a whole--that is, there is an opportunity to halt and reverse this trend.”

A key reason for Palestinian opposition to the accord is the provision to postpone talks on the future of Jerusalem for two years. Palestinians seek Arab East Jerusalem as their capital; Israel insists that the city remain united as the “eternal capital of the Jewish people.”

Wearing a picture of a burning Israeli flag and a dagger jabbed through the map of Israel--part of Hamas’ campaign material--Hussein Jabr, 25, a member of the Islamic bloc at Birzeit, said he hoped the elections would stop the peace process. “All Palestine is Muslim land, and it’s too difficult to accept compromise with our Israeli enemies when we want the rest of Palestine back,” he said.

Under the accord signed in September, the PLO assumes full control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank district of Jericho in the spring and begins to administer the rest of the West Bank with full elections to be held by mid-July. The ultimate status of both regions, as well as of Jerusalem, will be decided in subsequent negotiations.

In other developments, Israeli troops killed the leader of the Hamas militia in the Gaza Strip in a shootout at a roadblock. Imad Aqal, 24, was described as a “dangerous fugitive” who topped the army’s most-wanted list after personally killing three soldiers and commanding more than 20 operations.

Israel’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak, said the action was an “important achievement in the war against terror.”

Aqal claimed responsibility for the killing of two Israeli soldiers in Gaza last month. A book published by Hamas this week quoted him as saying he “hoped to go to paradise by being killed by Israeli soldiers.” As the news of Aqal’s killing spread, a call went out from mosque loudspeakers calling for a general strike today in his memory.