The Palestinian leadership hit back at a report by a leading international rights watchdog that denounced resistance bombers as "war criminals" and said the Palestinian Authority (PA) bore heavy responbility for not stopping them.

A top advisor to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat condemned the report by the US-based Human Rights Watch, arguing that Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was behind resistance bombings.

"We strongly criticize the report's content, especially those passages that say the president (Arafat) and the PA bear the responsibility," for resistance attacks, Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP.

Abu Rudeina stressed Friday that "the occupation is entirely responsible for everything that occurs and it must be ended.

""We demand that Human Rights Watch also criticize the occupation, which leads to those operations and criticize the Jenin and Rafah massacres caused by that very occupation," he also said.

He was referring to Israeli incursions and strikes that have left scores of Palestinians dead, many of them civilians.

Hardline Islamic groups singled out in the report, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, also slammed the rights watchdog.

HRW's "way of thinking is Zionist and one-sided," charged Islamic Jihad official Mohammed al-Hindi.

"The report speaks the same language as (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon and the Israeli extremists," he said.

A top Hamas spokesman described the report as "exactly biased toward the Zionist enemy."

"It omits every crime committed by Israel" against the Palestinians, said Abdelaziz Rantissi, adding that he saw "a suspect Zionist hand" in this report.

In the harrowing report, entitled "Erased in a Moment," Human Rights Watch said there were "important steps that Arafat and the PA could and should have taken to prevent or deter resistance bombings against civilians.

"The failure to take those steps implies a high degree of responsibility for what occurred," it added.

The report details the deaths of 415 Israeli and other civilians, and the wounding of 2,000 more up until August 2002 in Palestinian attacks. More than 250 of those dead were killed in resistance bombings.

An up-to-date death toll puts the total number of casualties on the Israeli side at 637 people. Some 1,949 Palestinians have also died since the beginning of the 25-month uprising.

Human Rights Watch has also been sharply critical of Israel's military tactics. It released a report in May 2002 that charged Israel had committed war crimes during its invasion of the West Bank town of Jenin in April.

Another renowned rights group, British-based Amnesty International, is scheduled to release a report Monday that also claims Israel committed war crimes during its six-week Operation Defensive Shield on the West Bank last spring.

PHOTO CAPTION

Jewish volunteers put the leg of a Palestinian resistance bomber in a bag