OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 8 August — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is set to hold a rare meeting with his political rivals in a bid to forge an alliance with them and present a united front against Israel, his information minister, Yasser Abed Rabbo, said yesterday.

Abed Rabbo said Arafat planned to hold the meeting over the “coming days” to try to establish a national dialogue among the Palestinian groups. Many of the organizations, including the Hamas and Islamic Jihad, oppose Arafat’s Palestinian Authority agreeing to some form of compromise with Israel to end the decades-long conflict. “The Palestinian Authority will form a committee of high officials to start a national dialogue with Palestinian organizations and parties,” Abed Rabbo told reporters.

“The meeting will be between all the associations and will be headed by Yasser Arafat.”

Arafat said in Amman yesterday after a meeting with Jordanian Prime Minister Ali Abu Ragheb that the Israel’s most-wanted list of seven Palestinian activists  shows Tel Aviv is seeking to “wipe out political officials,” rather than military targets.

On the question of forming a government of national unity with Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, Arafat replied “we would react favorably to approaches from all those who may wish to join the current government.”  Palestinian Minister of State Ziyad Abu Zayed said yesterday the 11-month uprising was isolating the Palestinian Authority. It’s losing its influence to groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas due to Israel’s policy of assassinating Palestinians, he said.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Army has given its soldiers, deployed in the Palestinian territories, a free hand to carry out killings signifying a further departure from a US-brokered cease-fire that never took hold. The changes give commanders and soldiers a carte blanche to fire live rounds in confrontations with Palestinians.

“In the past few days, the rules of engagement have been relaxed for our soldiers owing to the increase in armed attacks and to ensure the security of our forces,” Lt. Col. Olivier  Rafovitch said. The daily Haaretz said the new rules would allow Israeli troops to fire on “any Palestinian carrying a weapon under circumstances that raise suspicions he may be a combatant against the army or belong to a Palestinian force operating against the army.  “In response to fire coming from an unidentified source, IDF troops have permission to respond immediately, to deter further Palestinian fire,” it added.

Israel intends to launch an unprecedented global propaganda blitz within days in a bid to reverse its rapidly diminishing image following 10 months of conflict with the Palestinians. High-ranking officials have been dispatched to France to hire a major public relations firm to restore the Jewish state’s reputation across Europe, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ deputy spokesman, Emmanuel Nahshon, told AFP.

A Palestinian policeman who Israel said it had shot dead while trying to plant a bomb was in fact beaten to death, a Palestinian doctor who examined his body told AFP yesterday. Mahdi Miziet was beaten so badly by Israeli rifle butts that his skull had burst open and “bits of his brain spilled out,” said Ahmad Abu Bakr, who examined the body after the Israel Army delivered it Monday to the hospital, 10 hours after his death.

In another development, the Palestinian Authority appealed to the United States yesterday to intervene and stanch a new wave of Middle East violence just hours before an Israeli Arab was shot dead in fresh West Bank bloodshed. In Amman, an Israeli businessman was found shot dead in his villa in the Jordanian capital, an Israeli diplomat and Jordanian security sources said. An Israeli man was killed by Palestinian shooting in West Bank late yesterday.

Three Palestinian children were injured, one seriously, by shrapnel from shells in heavy exchanges of fire between Israeli troops and Palestinians in the area of Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip yesterday, Palestinian hospital sources said.