ARAFAT REQUESTS BACKING OF PEACE PACT SPONSORS TO HELP HALT SETTLEMENT.

Byline: Serge Schmemann The New York Times

Yasser Arafat appealed Saturday to foreign sponsors of the Middle Eastern peace to ``save the peace process'' from Israel's plan to build a new Jewish neighborhood on occupied land in Jerusalem.

``The situation is really serious,'' Arafat told representatives of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Arab countries at an emergency meeting he had called on the crisis in the Israeli-Palestinian peace effort. ``What we are facing today from settlements in holy Jerusalem and in the rest of the Palestinian territories is a plan to destroy the peace process.''

But attempts by the Arab delegates to conclude the meeting with a resolution criticizing Israel were blocked by the U.S. representative, who declared that Washington would not agree to any outcome that attacked Israel.

Participants said the American delegate, Edward G. Abington, the U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, was alone in his opposition, which drew some angry assertions from the Arab delegates and concluded the three-hour meeting in a sullen air.

Israel was not invited and denounced the meeting in advance as a violation of the Oslo agreements, which say that disputes must be worked out on a bilateral basis. On the eve of the meeting, the Israeli Cabinet met and unanimously agreed to start work on the controversial building project this week, despite warnings from security agencies that that could well provoke violent Palestinian resistance.

In a related development, Jordan announced that King Hussein would travel to Israel today to pay condolence calls on the families of some of the seven girls who were killed Thursday by a lone Jordanian soldier while visiting an island in the Jordan Valley shared by Jordan and Israel.

The shooting followed the publication of a sharply critical personal letter from the king to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which was blamed by some Israelis for creating the atmosphere in which an unstable soldier turned violent.

Shortly after the shootings, Hussein asked Netanyahu to allow him to visit the bereaved families, a gesture intended to demonstrate his remorse and his commitment to sustain the Israeli-Jordanian partnership despite the various crises in Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Jordanian relations.

Israeli officials said Netanyahu would greet the king at Ben-Gurion Airport and would accompany him on his condolence visits in a public demonstration of their reconciliation.

The meeting in Gaza City was seen as a final attempt by Arafat to mobilize foreign governments to stop Israel's construction of the new neighborhood of 6,500 housing units for Jews in southeastern Jerusalem.

The site, known to Arabs as Jabal Abu Ghneim and to Israelis as Har Homa, would complete a ring of Jewish settlement around southern Jerusalem, and would effectively cut off Arab East Jerusalem from Bethlehem and other Palestinian regions in the southern West Bank.

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Photo: Yasser Arafat

Calls crisis meeting