PLO MAY DROP GOAL TO RUIN ISRAEL.

Byline: Serge Schemann The New York Times

The Palestine National Council, the Palestinian parliament-in-exile whose roster of members reads like a who's who of Israel's old enemies, convened Monday in Gaza to hear Yasser Arafat say that the time had come to formally take Israel's destruction off the Palestinian agenda.

Participants said some hard bargaining lay ahead for Arafat over the next three days to convince the members, many of them hard-core radicals, to make any conciliatory gesture toward Israel at a time when Israeli troops were striking refugee camps in Lebanon, and Gaza was in its seventh week under harsh Israeli restrictions imposed in the wake of bomb attacks in Israel.

Though some of the biggest names of the Palestinian resistance, like George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Nayef Hawatmeh of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, declined to come, those who did accept Israel's offer of safe-conduct for the meeting included several whose names still inspire rage among Israelis.

Among an estimated 500 delegates gathered in Gaza's modern Cultural Center for a meeting that was planned several weeks ago, there was Mohammed Abbas, also known as Abu Abbas, who led the group that hijacked the Achille Lauro in 1985 and killed a disabled American passenger, and who is still wanted in the United States. There was also Mohammed Daoud Odeh, who as Abu Daoud is held accountable by Israel for the killing of Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972, though he has denied any role in that attack.

It was to ensure that the Palestinians formally abandon the calls for the destruction of Israel enshrined in the ``covenant'' that the Palestine Liberation Organization adopted on its inception in 1964 that Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres granted permission for all members of the Palestine National Council to enter Israel.

Under the Israeli-Palestinian agreement signed in September, Arafat pledged to purge the document of articles like No. 15, which declares it a duty of the Palestinian nation ``to repulse the Zionist, imperialist invasion from the great Arab homeland and to purge the Zionist presence from Palestine.''

The agreement called for the charter to be amended by early May.

In his impassioned opening speech, Arafat called on the council not to give Israel an excuse to further delay the establishment of the Palestinian homeland.

``I call on the council to amend all the articles which contradict the peace of the brave which we signed, and to authorize the legal committee to draft a charter which will take into account new developments,'' Arafat said. ``One inch of Palestinian land and our presence on the land of Palestine is more dear than words on paper.''

Outside the hall, refusing to participate and distributing militant leaflets against the peace agreements with Israel, was Leila Khaled, who became a revolutionary icon of the 1970s after participating in the hijackings of two airplanes. Khaled accepted the offer of a safe return, but joined in a decision of the Popular Front to send only a symbolic delegation to the session.

The organizations represented at the gathering were as steeped in intrigue and violence as they were redundant in their names: besides Habash's Popular Front and Hawatmeh's Democratic Front, which sent only symbolic delegations, there were Abu Abbas's Palestinian Liberation Front, the Palestinian Peoples Party, the Palestinian Democratic Union, the Arab Liberation Front, the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, and, of course, Arafat's Fatah.

The most notable absence was that of the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command. The two militant Islamic groups in Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both targets of the Israeli and Palestinian crackdown, are not members of the council, and Hamas distributed an appeal to council members to avoid amending the covenant until its members were released from prison.