NABLUS, West Bank, April 8, 2008 (AFP) - After seven years of hiding from the Israeli army in the narrow streets of the northern West Bank city of Nablus, Abu Islam has traded his rifle and mask for an oven and an apron.

The 39-year-old veteran of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a group loosely tied to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party, now runs a bakery in the centre of town thanks to an amnesty agreement.

But like many in Nablus, which saw fierce fighting during the intifada, Abu Islam doubts that the latest Palestinian-led security crackdown will pave the way for peace with Israel.

He asked that his full name not be used.

"The day the Israelis withdraw from the West Bank Hamas will take over... The people are under so much pressure now that the situation could explode at any time," he says, handing bags of warm flatbread to customers.

"It will be the kids, the 18- to 20-year-old guys who have no work," he adds. "No one will be able to control it when it happens, not the security forces, not anyone."

Abbas deployed several hundred police reinforcements in Nablus ahead of a US conference last November at which Israel and the Palestinians relaunched formal peace talks after a seven-year hiatus.

Under the internationally drafted 2003 roadmap agreement which forms the basis of the current negotiations, Israel must freeze settlement activity and the Palestinians must improve security in the West Bank.

Late last month Israel approved the deployment of 600 Palestinian police reinforcements to the neighbouring town of Jenin, another former bastion of the intifada, largely basing the decision on the success of the Nablus plan.

Since the crackdown began five months ago Palestinian forces have come down hard on criminal gangs, ridding the streets of weapons, confiscating more than 650 stolen cars and sending some 4,000 cases to trial.

But they have been more lenient in going after armed political factions.

"He who fights and struggles against the occupation is not a terrorist, he is a hero. I consider him a hero," Jamal al-Muhaisen, the governor of Nablus who has been overseeing the security crackdown, says.

Under an agreement reached in July 2007 former fighters like Abu Islam who turn in their weapons to the Palestinian Authority and agree to halt attacks on Israel can be granted amnesty after serving three months of detention.

-- 'Every West Bank town is like a prison block' --

But Muhaisen says the Islamist Hamas movement, which seized power in the Gaza Strip after routing forces loyal to Abbas last June, is a "different story" because its members have refused to surrender their weapons.

"Their weapons are not used for resisting the occupation but for killing Palestinians," he says, adding that his forces have confiscated more than 250 assault rifles, mostly M-16s, from Hamas militants since November.

"If we hear that a hundred Hamas fighters have weapons out in the villages we will go, and even if there is a bloodbath we will take the weapons. We will not allow what happened in Gaza to happen here," he says.

Israeli officials admit the new security plan has reduced crime in the West Bank but have been loath to credit the Palestinians with preventing attacks on Israel and say they only pursue Hamas for their own interests.

"They are not going to use the police and the security forces to prevent terror attacks, they are only going to use them to make things better for the people of Nablus," says defence ministry spokesman Shlomo Dror.

"That's fine with us. We do not expect the Palestinians to do the job we do."

The Palestinians accuse Israel of undermining the security plan by sending its own forces into Nablus almost nightly and by preventing Palestinian police from operating outside the city.

"We have to get permission from the Israeli side, which usually does not provide it very quickly," Muhaisen says. "A lot of wanted men have escaped to the villages, especially those under complete Israeli control."

Israel maintains a tight noose of settlements and checkpoints around Nablus, severely limiting movement into and out of the town of 150,000 which was once the West Bank's commercial capital.

"We live in a prison. Every town in the West Bank is just a different prison block," Hassan Senakri, a member of Palestinian intelligence, says as he buys bread from Abu Islam's shop. The two men appear to be friends.

"They ordered us to improve security, to confiscate all the weapons and take them off the streets, and we did it. But what have they done for us?"

Last month Israel announced it would remove some 50 of the nearly 600 roadblocks and checkpoints scattered across the West Bank, but Muhaisen says the move has had no impact on the local economy.

Israel says the roadblocks and checkpoints are needed for security reasons. "If we remove the roadblocks then for sure, a short time later, we will have an attack in Israel," Dror says.

Meanwhile Hamas, which has come under intense pressure from both the Israeli army and Palestinian security forces in recent months, remains popular in Nablus and appears to be biding its time while the peace talks languish.

"Israel still enters the city, arrests people, kills people, destroys houses, even though in the West Bank there is zero resistance," says Abu Said, a local Hamas member, asking that his full name be withheld.

"If they don't give us anything then at any time the streets can erupt, and next time the resistance will be even stronger and more dangerous," the 45-year-old shopkeeper says.

"If there is a new intifada it won't just be Hamas out there fighting," Abu Said says with a smile. "It will be the sons of Fatah, the sons of the Palestinian Authority."

Copyright (c) 2008 Agence France-Presse/Reliefweb