AL-KHALIL -- Moshe Ya'alon, chief of Staff of the Israeli Occupation Army, has described Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation and apartheid as a ''malignant cancer that keeps sreading.'' Speaking on the state-run Israeli television last night, Ya'alon said Palestinian resistance constituted what he termed ''an existential threat'' to Israel's existence more than that which Hizbullah and Iraq pose.

He argued that the continuation of Palestinian resistance in spite of Israel's harsh repression and collective punishments shows that the Palestinians were targeting the very existence of the Zionist state.

Ya'alon said Israel ought to defeat the Palestinians in order to convince them that they couldn't gain freedom through resistance.

Palestinian officials described Ya'alon's remarks as ''mendacious and hysterical.'' ''How can a tormented civilian population struggling to maintain physical survival poses a threat to a nuclear power which has the only super power in the world as her guardian and ally?'' asked PA official Sa'eb Ureikat, IRNA reported.

Ureikat accused Ya'alon and other Zionist military and political leaders of seeking to justify and cover up their Nazi-like crimes against the Palestinian people by playing the role of the victim. ''They are slaughtering Palestinian civilians on a daily basis, they are imprisoning three million people in their homes for weeks and months, they are reducing our towns and villages to concentration camps and after all of this they have the audacity to accuse us of threatening them.''