AMARI REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank - His face unshaven and his clothes disheveled, Khalid Idris deftly roams the back alleys here, sleeping in a different house each night to avoid the Israeli army patrols searching for him.
The burly 36-year-old is a member of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the militant wing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's mainstream Fatah political party.
But Idris increasingly finds himself at odds with Fatah, whose leaders have repeatedly called for an end to attacks inside Israel. His sister, Wafa Idris, blew herself up a year ago in downtown Jerusalem, killing one Israeli and wounding more than 100 others.
"Everyone has his own point of view," Idris said yesterday at the refugee camp's Fatah headquarters, a crumbling three-story building that bears the scars of repeated Israeli raids over the past six months.
Idris spoke during a break in a curfew imposed by the army, carefully venturing out from a safe house and walking the sandy streets while conferring by cell phone with lookouts in case of a surprise appearance by soldiers.
He is typical of the hundreds of militants the Israeli army has killed and the thousands it has arrested in the past six months during raids into cities, villages and refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
"The Israelis are killing us every day," Idris said. "What should we do? We would like peace. But it's not peace for Israel and death for Palestinians." If Israeli soldiers can target Palestinians, he argued, then Palestinians can target Israeli civilians.
His statements strike at the heart of a dispute raging within Fatah and the Palestinian Authority over the future of a conflict now well into its third year. To a large degree, the infighting represents a power struggle between the deputies of 73-year-old Arafat and a younger generation playing by its own rules.
Splinter factions of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades - which was formed under the auspices of the Fatah political movement at the onset of violence 27 months ago - are ignoring Arafat's orders for a cease-fire and are launching renegade operations.
The disunity comes at an inopportune time. Fatah's leaders are meeting in Cairo, Egypt, with other militant groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, to persuade them to call a cease-fire, an effort that would appear hypocritical if Fatah can't get its own members to go along.
One breakaway faction of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades sent two Palestinian suicide bombers into southern Tel Aviv on Sunday evening. Standing on parallel streets, they detonated duffel bags filled with explosives, killing themselves and 22 people and breaking a six-week reprieve from such attacks.
That faction, consisting of about a dozen people from the northern West Bank city of Nablus, was trained and funded by the Islamic Jihad, a small but powerful fundamentalist group based in Damascus, Syria, according to Israeli intelligence reports and Palestinian officials.
Such cooperation is becoming more common as brigade members grow disenfranchised from Fatah and look for alternate sources of financial and political support. Israeli military sweeps have shattered many militant cells, which are regrouping by pooling their resources.
The faction that struck Tel Aviv calls itself Kataeb al-Awdah, or Brigades of Return. In leaflets, its members said they felt abandoned by Fatah leaders and called suicide bombers "the official spokesmen for the martyrs" and "the mouthpiece for the Arab character of Palestine, its holiness and liberty."
Fatah at first vehemently disavowed any link to the twin Tel Aviv bombings, and Palestinian police detained a Gaza-based reporter for al-Jazeera television for reporting the connection.
"That Fatah was involved was embarrassing," said Qadura Faris, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council from Ramallah and a senior Fatah leader who opposes suicide bombings. "These continued attacks are a result of an administrative failure within the Fatah movement."
But Faris defended the establishment of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which provided a way for Fatah to continue running what it calls a popular uprising while giving it political distance from Arafat and the Palestinian Authority.
"The Al Aqsa Brigades should be an armed group, but under the orders of our political leadership," Faris said. "We left the group to its own initiative, and it's out of control. I think we can still surround them and re-control them."
Fatah activists ran the first Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which typically consisted of stone-throwing youths facing off against Israeli soldiers. But this latest conflict involved guns, and the armed Aqsa Martyrs Brigades quickly came into being.
At first, its members concentrated on targeting Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers on the West Bank, arguing that a battle to end occupation should be fought on the occupied land. But as violence escalated, the secular militia adopted the harsher tactics of the fundamentalist Hamas and Islamic Jihad - which send suicide bombers into Israeli cities and, unlike Fatah, oppose the existence of a Jewish state.
Idris, the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades member in the Amari camp, appeared confused by the discord among the group's members. During an interview, he voiced unequivocal support for Arafat and Fatah doctrine, but also recited the militant refrain that "as long as Israel occupies our land, we have a right to resist by all means."
He said he felt let down when top Palestinian leaders called the armed uprising a "historic mistake." But he said if a cease-fire is worked out in Cairo, he will abide by it.
"There are two points of view within Fatah," said Younis Abu Reesh, 30, who runs the Fatah youth center in the Amari camp. "A few people think that suicide bombings are the way to victory. But a majority want a political solution."
"This is a healthy debate," he said, "like in any family."
But like Idris, Reesh complained that Fatah's leaders are out of touch with what happens in the refugee camps.
"Israeli soldiers come into our camps and destroy our lives," Reesh said. "Don't expect me, as a Palestinian, as a refugee, to just stand by and watch."
Just how much leeway the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades had or has now is a source of debate between Palestinians and Israelis. At the beginning of the uprising, many members doubled as Palestinian police officers, and Israeli officials seized documents showing that Arafat made payments to the militia.
Now, after Aqsa Martyrs Brigade attacks, Israeli leaders blame Arafat, calling his pleas for a cease-fire and his condemnations of militant attacks dishonest because groups supposedly under his control operate with apparent impunity.
Israeli army Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, head of military intelligence, told a security cabinet meeting Monday that Arafat is maneuvering between extreme and moderate factions to see how the debate evolves.
He said the Nablus faction responsible for Sunday's bombings in Tel Aviv is linked to recent attacks at an Israeli kibbutz, a mall near Tel Aviv and a polling booth in Israel's north.
Palestinian officials say Israeli occupation of West Bank cities and restrictions on movement make it impossible for Arafat to crack down on groups that disobey his orders.
"I think the chain of command is in a crisis," said Ziad Abu Amr, a Palestinian legislator from Gaza who studies militant groups and has mediated several cease-fires. "There is no central leadership and no iron-clad discipline. There are factions here and there, and they operate on their own."
Amr said that "sometimes they want to retaliate against Israeli attacks and sometimes they just want to attack their own political leadership. Fatah has made the political decision to stop attacks. The problem is that they cannot get their people to comply."
Amr said Hamas has been showing some flexibility and might agree to stop suicide attacks - if Israel withdraws its troops from Palestinian cities and agrees to halt targeted killings. Islamic Jihad has thus far refused to make any concessions, he said.
"From what I have learned from Cairo, it appears promising," Amr said. "But of course, if Fatah groups continue to attack, this might become embarrassing for Hamas and Islamic Jihad."