GAZA CITY, June 5 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - One of the most powerful officials in the Palestinian security services, Colonel Mohammed Dahlan, has resigned, the Palestinian daily newspaper, Al-Ayyam said Wednesday, June 5, quoting the Gaza Strip preventive security chief himself, news agencies reported.

“President [Yasser] Arafat agreed to my offer to resign and I am happy with this,” Dahlan was quoted by the daily as saying. Dahlan was not available for comment Wednesday, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Dahlan had headed the Gaza Strip preventive security force for seven years.

Among the reasons for his resignation were the fact that the Israeli press were saying he was the choice of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to head the security services after Arafat carried out promised reforms to streamline command structures.

CIA chief George Tenet proposed Tuesday, June 4, that Arafat combine his sprawling security empire into only three services, Israeli officials said, reported AFP.

Tenet is on a mission to reshape the Palestinian police and militias in a bid to cut down on persistent attacks on Israel.

The two men held almost three hours of talks, which Arafat aide Nabil Abu Rudeina described as “very important”, without giving details.

Afterwards, the officials said the Palestinian national security council was meeting to discuss the Tenet proposals.

Concretely, Tenet was said to have called for creation of a national security service, an intelligence service and a police service. The police would take over the work of existing preventive security services, under the interior ministry.

The Palestinian daily newspaper, Al-Quds, said earlier that Arafat would present Tenet with a plan outlining his reforms, cutting back the number of security branches to six from a dozen now.

That would include a national security branch, preventive security, general intelligence, a presidential guard, military intelligence and the police, the paper said.

Abu Rudeina said Arafat had impressed upon Tenet the need for an end to Israeli raids on Palestinian self-rule towns, as the army stormed into both Jenin in the north of the West Bank and Hebron in the south, killing a teenager.

On Monday, Palestinian information minister Yasser Abd Rabbo said Tenet’s mission would fail unless Israel ended its daily incursions.

“If Tenet wants his mission to succeed he must create the conditions to stop the Israeli aggression and lift the siege and apartheid system imposed on Palestinian lands,” Abd Rabbo said.

Tenet arrived at Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters in a U.S. motorcade escorted by Palestinian police and went straight into talks with the Palestinian leader. U.S. officials declined to comment on the content of the talks.

Colonel Jibril Rajoub, the head of West Bank preventive security - the powerful security branch tasked with stopping attacks on Israel - was seen entering Arafat’s headquarters building shortly afterwards.

But his Gaza Strip counterpart, Colonel Mohammed Dahlan, was spotted driving through town away from the building.

The two men are reportedly in a struggle for power for the top security job, as Arafat plans to trim down his multifarious security branches under a more unified command. Arafat met with security chiefs, including Rajoub, long after Tenet left.

Separately, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs William Burns held high-level talks in Damascus and Beirut seeking support for a “three-track” U.S. strategy for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Burns called in Beirut for calm on Lebanon’s border with Israel and for support of Washington’s “three-track” peace strategy.

That calls for starting a political process toward a two-states solution, supporting Palestinian efforts to build strong institutions in preparation for statehood and ensuring effective Palestinian performance on security.

In Damascus earlier, President Bashar Al-Assad stuck to Syria’s long-standing position on the Arab-Israeli conflict as he met with Burns.

Assad insisted that any peace efforts should be based on U.N. resolutions and also gave a lukewarm reception to a proposed peace conference.