JERUSALEM -- Israel has stepped back -- a bit -- from its threat to renege on its promise to withdraw troops from Palestinian areas of the West Bank.
"The government is going to implement the agreement," a spokesman for the Israeli Cabinet said yesterday at the end of an extraordinary three-day closed session on the future of the peace agreement signed with Palestinians in September 1993.
Redeployment of troops from Palestinian towns in the occupied West Bank "is part of the agreement," said the spokesman, Shmuel Hollander.
But the statement issued by the Cabinet qualified its pledge to fulfill the pact signed before President Clinton on the White House lawn. Israel "will act according to its principles and lessons learned to date," the statement said.
That phrase is seen as a veiled threat that Israel will not move its troops as it did from the Gaza Strip if there is a continuation of Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
A conciliatory Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, yesterday acknowledged: "We have to understand the necessity of the Israelis for security. We have to put it in our consideration."
The Cabinet meeting was part of a flurry of efforts to salvage the tattered agreement on Palestinian autonomy. Ironically, the principals in the plan -- Mr. Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres -- are due to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for the historic agreement tomorrow in Oslo, Norway.
Both sides have violated the agreement. Soon after signing, Israel announced that it would ignore the deadlines for troop withdrawal. The PLO has failed to revoke parts of its charter that call for the destruction of Israel, as promised in the pact.
But the biggest threat to the peace plan has been a series of suicide attacks within Israel carried out by Muslim fundamentalists. Israel has held Mr. Arafat responsible for failing to stop the attacks, charging that the radicals are operating out of the Gaza Strip, which Israel turned over to Palestinian self-rule in May.
Mr. Rabin threw the peace plan into question recently by hinting that Israel might not go through with the next stage of the autonomy agreement if the attacks do not stop.
The agreement calls for the "redeployment" of Israeli troops away from populated Palestinian areas in the West Bank and the holding of elections among the Palestinians. Both were supposed to have occurred in July but were postponed.
Some ministers in his government have urged Mr. Rabin to leave the troops in place to guard the Jewish settlements scattered throughout the West Bank.
The Palestinians have condemned those suggestions and said that any such unilateral change by Israel would end the peace agreement. In meetings Wednesday with Mr. Rabin and Mr. Arafat, U.S. Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher tried to patch up the dispute.
Yesterday, Mr. Peres hastily arranged a meeting with Mr. Arafat at the border of the Gaza Strip in an attempt to show reconciliation. After the meeting, Mr. Peres said Israel cannot refuse to carry out its side of the agreement.
"No modification is possible but by mutual agreement," he said of the accord. "I don't think there is any need for a change."
But Mr. Peres noted, "Israel is concerned very much on the security issue, an issue that we cannot and should not compromise."
Mr. Arafat acknowledged Israel's concerns over security. But hours later at a PLO rally in the Gaza Strip, Mr. Arafat pledged to "raise the flags of Palestine over the minarets of Jerusalem."
He was quoted by Israel Television as saying, "Whether anyone likes it or not, Jerusalem will become the capital of Palestine."
The sovereignty of Jerusalem, hotly claimed by both sides, is scheduled to be settled by negotiation in three to five years under the agreement.
The Israeli Cabinet met Sunday, Wednesday and yesterday to debate the continuation of the peace agreement. The statement issued after its session was worded in general terms to play down the split within the Cabinet and to avoid embarrassing the Israeli officials who are due to receive the Nobel Prize tomorrow.
Hawks within Mr. Rabin's coalition say there is no way troops can be withdrawn, as the agreement demands, and still protect the 110,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Doves say some of those settlements should be abandoned now.
"The discussion has not been completed," said Education Minister Shulamit Aloni, indicating that the divisions remain unresolved.