OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, July 3 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Under a continuing Israeli occupation, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat fired another powerful official Tuesday, June 2, as foreign envoys failed to agree on whether the veteran leader should stay or go.

Under mounting pressure to reform his beleaguered administration, Arafat fired the powerful head of his West Bank preventive security service, Colonel Jibril Rajoub, after he fired another long-time security chief and police commander General Ghazi Jabali, Palestinian officials told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Rajoub had long been close to Arafat but fell out with the Palestinian leader earlier this year during a row in which Arafat allegedly threatened the one-time West Bank strongman with a pistol.

The preventive security forces are a powerful service charged among other duties with stopping resistance attacks on Israeli targets.

Israel and the United States have pressured Arafat to merge the Gaza and West Bank branches to afford a more unified command structure to curb anti-Israeli attacks.

Other heads to roll as part of Arafat’s 100-day reform plan of sweeping changes in the financial, judicial and security sectors were the head of Arafat’s police forces, General Jabali, and Mahmud Abu Marzuk, the head of Palestinian civil defense.

U.S. President George W. Bush has called for Arafat to be replaced based on these accusations, saying his regime is “tainted by terror.”

But Bush appeared to be winning little support among his European allies for his hard-line stance.

After meeting with Arafat, Junior British foreign office minister Mike O’Brien said the Palestinian Authority needed to “reform its institutions and create circumstances in which other representatives can come forward with whom we can deal, as well as President Arafat.”

O’Brian’s statement was issued after envoys from the Middle East “Quartet”, the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, met in London to examine ways of bringing about reforms of the Palestinian Authority.

A European diplomat told AFP that the quartet’s meeting was “rather positive”, but that it had not even touched on the sensitive topic of the legitimacy or the political role of Arafat.

“The discussions were rather about a subject which has been in the air for a long time, the reforms that the Palestinian leadership must engage in, and the means by which the Palestinians can be helped to put these into practice, particularly the subject of a independent judiciary and elections,” the diplomat said.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has taken a softer stance on Arafat, dismissed any talk of a rift with the United States, while calling Tuesday for new Palestinian leaders to take their place alongside Yasser Arafat.      

He insisted that trans-Atlantic relations were “solid, sound and working well”, he told Britain’s Channel 4 news.

A U.S. official said the quartet’s envoys, meeting for the first time since Bush unveiled his blueprint for the Middle East last week, had been looking to create a steering committee to assist in the reform of the Palestinian Authority.

The committee would be responsible for prioritizing the needs of the Palestinians as they undertake their own efforts to reform their security services, legal system and economy, said State Department spokeswoman Lynn Cassel.

Cassel would not elaborate on the composition or exact mandate of the steering committee but said the meeting had found all four quartet members in general agreement on the need for Palestinian reform.

She noted that the Palestinians themselves had begun to take “the first important steps” toward reform but called on them to do more to win back the confidence of the international community.

The talks also came as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has repeatedly said that neither he nor other U.S. officials have any plans to meet Arafat because his leadership has been “flawed”.

For its part, Britain has said it will deal with whoever the Palestinians elect as leader.

Meanwhile, the Israeli army drafted Tuesday thousands of extra reservists to maintain its occupation of the West Bank, with the Knesset also passing a law extending the maximum call-up period for reservists, AFP said.

Israel has re-occupied seven of the eight main towns and cities in the West Bank. The army briefly pulled out of Qalqilya in the northwest for several hours Tuesday before returning, Israeli media reports said.

Troops also raided several West Bank villages, arresting a leader of the Islamic Jihad and a number of other people, including several students detained when they turned up to exams at Hebron Polytechnic University.