With students returning to school this week, some 500 Palestinian Arab children can brag to their classmates of a most unusual form of summer fun: training in weapons and in hand-to-hand combat sponsored by Chairman Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

A group of 135 students, volunteers from the youth-wing of the PLO's mainstream Fatah organization, held a graduation ceremony in Gaza earlier this week in which they demonstrated how they would defend convoys of cars and capture Israeli troops trying to infiltrate the Gaza Strip. Skinny youths, scarcely taller than their rifles, forced others to lie face-down on the ground with their hands behind their backs as red-bereted PA security officials nodded their approval.

Some 500 Palestinian youth, aged 11 to 20, are currently undergoing the paramilitary training, Fatah official Abd al-Rauf Bardai said at the graduation ceremony. The three-month course is designed to prepare a cadre of trained civilians in the event of future clashes with the Israel Defense Force. Speculation is rife that violence will erupt if Mr. Arafat declares an independent Palestinian state next May, as he has pledged to do.

The youths will be prepared "to meet any surprise following the announcement of the Palestinian state, which might lead to the Israelis coming back into Gaza," Mr. Bardai said.

Israel has denounced the military training in the camps as a violation of the Oslo accords. Already, government officials note, the PA has at least 40,000 members in its various security services, some 60% over the limit allowed under Oslo. The youth-training increases the manpower pool available to the unofficial Palestinian army, officials say.

"If [the camps] were an isolated thing that would be one matter, but it's part of a larger picture in which the Palestinians act as if they did not cancel the Palestinian covenant calling for Israel's destruction," said the director of Israel's Government Press Office, Moshe Fogel. "It's no longer just an academic debate on whether or not the covenant has been cancelled. Aside from the fact that the military training obviously is contrary to the Oslo Accords, it goes to the heart of educating the Palestinian public in terms of peace. It's more dangerous and more problematic than any piece of paper," Mr. Fogel said.

Campers are also indoctrinated to oppose reconciliation with Israel. They are taught that even areas within Israel's pre-1967 borders are Palestinian; unlike camps in America, where children may be organized into groups named for colors or animals, the Palestinian campers are divided into groups named for Arab cities and villages lost in Israel's 1948 War of Independence.

According to a July article in the semi-official PA paper, al-Hayat al-Jadida, the camp commander explained that the "focus on the military side is in order to create a generation which will be able to handle all possibilities." A week later, the commander described the camps to the paper as "a mission under the auspices of the political guidance to build a generation who is capable of shouldering the responsibilities of the present and the past, who can arrive at Jerusalem, fight the settlements and build the independent Palestinian state."

The graduation ceremony comes as a recent study by the Israeli group Palestinian Media Watch cites numerous television and press reports as an indication of a continued Palestinian refusal to accept Israel's legitimacy, including oblique references to Israel as the "Zionist entity," "Zionist enemy" or "the Tel Aviv government."

At the same time, Palestinian security forces have accelerated and intensified their military training this summer, focusing on the use of larger formations for complex missions such as conquering and holding Israeli military posts or penetrating Jewish settlements. The head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Uzi Landau, told the Forward that the Palestinian Authority has managed to smuggle rocket-propelled grenades and land mines into its territory; other sources warn of heavier anti-tank and, possibly, anti-aircraft weapons. Some half-dozen smuggling tunnels from Egypt into the Gaza Strip have been discovered and closed by the Israeli army, and Defense Minister Mordechai acknowledged this summer that Israeli intelligence has warned that Mr. Arafat's helicopter is being used to ferry arms between the West Bank and Gaza.

One Fatah official denied that the military training offered at the camps was anything more than normal summer fun. "If I have a summer camp and the young people have training in sports and other activities like swimming, one of these activities is guns and military activity," said the head of Fatah Youth in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Hakim Awad. "You have to understand that it is a normal thing. It is an ordinary youth activity."

While the youth training does not increase any military threat the PA poses to Israel, it is intended as a warning, according to the director of the American Jewish Committee's Israel/Middle East office, Joseph Alpher. Palestinian security officials "know they could not withstand an Israeli onslaught but they want to signal to Israel that it will hurt, that if things get bad and Israel decides to invade the PA, it won't be a free lunch," Mr. Alpher said. "It's a low-level deterrent. It's signaling that an invasion will have not only a political price inside Israel and the Arab world, but also in the lives of soldiers, and in Israel of 1998 this carries a lot of weight, particularly casualties incurred in a conflict which is not seen as existential."

Ironically, several Palestinian campers said their model is the youth programs run by the pre-state Jewish yishuv, which trained teenagers to contribute to the struggle for independence. The youth training comes as Mr. Arafat has instructed the PA bureaucracy to draw up a detailed plan for the transition to statehood next spring.

"Arafat for almost two years has had no fruits of peace to show his constituents, and he is very concerned about losing the support of the Palestinian street," Mr. Alpher said. "He is using the expectation of the declaration of independence next May as a way of maintaining order and support. Clearly this is a recipe for an extremely volatile situation to develop, but at least on a day-to-day basis Arafat is using this as a vehicle to maintain support. I see the summer camps in the same vein."

Mr. Awad said the training at the camps was legitimate within the context of the peace process.

"All the time we are hearing what Netanyahu is saying, 'we want to go into Gaza and the West Bank if the Palestinians don't do what we want,'" Mr. Awad said. "You have to know that as the Palestinian youth we are defending the peace, the just peace."