International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, Nov. 25, 2002

The Palestinian Authority's Preventative Security Organization in Gaza has set up a factory for producing large quantities of nitric acid - a prime bomb making ingredient, according to a secret internal document seized in an IDF raid last week.

The factory's purpose was to serve terrorist groups limited in their production of high-grade explosives by Israeli blockades on chemicals imported into the territories. Although the smuggling of nitric acid and other similar chemicals has continued across the "Green Line" at an alarming rate throughout the intifada, the quantities available to the terror groups have been insufficient to make military grade explosives like TNT.

However, analysis of recent bombing attempts indicates Palestinians are increasingly able to produce explosives with a potency near that of military-grade materials.

The document, seized during the IDF raid on the Preventive Security Organization's headquarters in Gaza City last Sunday, described the setting up of the factory as a "strategic project." It indicated that the plant's annual production capacity of nitric acid could reach 15 tons, levels sufficient to produce military grade explosives.

The left wing Ha'aretz newspaper reported Monday the conclusion of Israeli defense analysts, that the Preventive Security Organization intended to provide all the Palestinian militant organizations, including those opposed to Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat, with explosives. Similarly, the PA provides arms to the organizations, among them Hamas.

The document was signed by an employee of the Palestinian Authority's Agriculture Ministry and addressed to the deputy head of the Preventative Security Organization - the Palestinian "security force" armed by Israel after the Oslo agreements. It provides the latest chain in a catalogue of evidence directly implicating the Palestinian Authority, under the leadership of Arafat, in supporting, sustaining and financing terrorist atrocities committed against Israeli civilians.

In the Gaza City raid, IDF forces confiscated a large arsenal of banned weapons and an explosives lab.

Another document found in the Gaza City raid evidences PA concern that Hamas was now being seen by the Egyptian government as a viable replacement for Arafat's regime. Egypt recently sponsored, alongside the European Union, several weeks of secret talks in Cairo between the radical Islamist Hamas and the Fatah movement, the dominant force within the PA.

It remains unclear exactly what was accomplished during those talks, with some press reports claiming the two sides agreed to up to a one-year truce on attacks against civilians inside Israel. Hamas has strenuously denied these reports, and even if true, such a pact has been breached repeatedly ever since even by Fatah.

Based on the latest documents uncovered in Gaza City, other reports seem much more credible when indicating that Fatah and Hamas were actually working out terms for continuing the armed initfada more effectively by sharing weapons, bomb-making facilities, terrorist operatives and other means of striking Israel.