Gazans at Activist’s Funeral Fear for Their Future : Mideast: Asad Saftawi is buried amid pleas for unity and peace in the run-up to self-government. He had delivered eulogy at same cemetery last month.

GAZA CITY, Israeli-Occupied Gaza Strip — With his usual mix of passion and reason, Asad Saftawi spoke a month ago at Martyrs’ Cemetery here in a moving eulogy for an assassinated Palestinian leader. His plea was for national unity, for determination to achieve independence and, above all, for peace.

On Friday, the eulogies at Martyrs’ Cemetery were for Saftawi himself, a founder of Fatah, the dominant faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the principal Palestinian grouping, and the pleas were more urgent to mourners of the school headmaster and political activist who was the latest victim of a political assassination in Gaza.

“Asad Saftawi became a victim of what he had tried to stop--an internal conflict that could bring us to civil war,” said Dr. Rabah Muhanna, a local leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. “Either we halt the killings, or we will plunge our nation into the bloodiest of conflicts.”

The assassination on Thursday of Saftawi, 58, by two masked gunmen threw the Gaza Strip into turmoil. The nightmare of civil conflict, of murderous power struggles, of political chaos now seemed to many to be a more real prospect than the peace and independence for which Palestinians have longed.

“Gaza is in pain today, Gaza is in real shock,” Talat Safadi, a leader of the pro-Communist Palestine People’s Party, told the 4,000 Gazans who attended Saftawi’s funeral. “The shining image of Gaza as part of a free and independent Palestine is collapsing before our eyes. We cannot let this happen.”

But Saftawi’s assassination--the third political murder in a month--demonstrated the dangers that Palestinians face as they emerge from the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to form their own government and, they hope, an independent state in time.

“Everyone feels Saftawi’s death, because he was a symbol of our struggle,” commented Kamal Hamada, a close friend of Saftawi, “and naturally we wonder what lies ahead for us and for our nation. More conspiracies, more killings, more struggle?

“This was a man who had devoted his life to the Palestinian cause, who had helped found Fatah, who was one of those closest to Abu Amar (Yasser Arafat, PLO chairman and leader of Fatah), who had advocated peace with Israel, who had worked for democracy in Palestine. So, who benefits from his murder?”

Speculation about Saftawi’s killers was widespread and uncertain, and it ate away at people’s mood as they gathered for Friday prayers at Gaza’s many mosques.

Some Gazans held that it was another death in Fatah’s own internal conflicts, part of a struggle for power in anticipation of regional autonomy scheduled for January and the result of the agreement between Israel and the PLO. Others believed that the killers were from Fatah’s rivals within or outside the PLO, though all these groups denounced the murder.

And there was the inevitable question of whether Israel was involved. “How does it happen that the best security and intelligence service in the Middle East and an army that can turn Gaza upside down if one (Israeli) settler is stabbed has found nothing in the murders of these three men?”

Despite the shouts for revenge among the mourners and the calls for calm from the political leaders, the prevalent feeling was fear and uncertainty--a clear loss of confidence in the period of self-government that is to come here soon--among those who packed the El Omari Mosque in town, lined the route to the cemetery and then attended the burial and the rally that followed.

With the murder of a leader respected by all factions, fear spread quickly that the political violence will escalate.

“Who will be next?” was the question that Gazans asked one another.

“Gaza is collapsing,” Safadi said at the post-funeral rally at Martyrs’ Cemetery. “People in Gaza are living in panic and fear, and we demand that the PLO leadership step in and stop these practices.”

With no realistic claims of responsibility, even senior cadres among Fatah’s Gaza operations were ready to suggest Friday that Saftawi was killed by the group’s younger members more accustomed to violence, who ran the uprising against Israel and who do not want to be supplanted under the autonomy accord by an older, more political generation open to accommodation with Israel.

In a message to the family, Arafat declared: “We will give the people who killed Asad the same thing--we will kill them.”