UNITED NATIONS – Syria’s Baathist president, Bashar Assad, has directed Damascus-trained Palestinian Arabs in Lebanese refugee camps, as well as Gaza and West Bank terrorists under Syria’s control, to escalate their anti-Israel operations, according to Arab, Israeli, and U.N. sources.

A U.N. official told The New York Sun that at two meetings conducted yesterday by Secretary-General Annan’s special envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, in Cairo, participants raised concerns that Mr. Assad would try to use attacks against Israel – carried out by his Palestinian Arab proxies – to deflect criticism of his regime. Mr. Larsen’s meetings were with Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, and separately with the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas. The Egyptians invited Mr. Larsen to brief the U.N. envoy on an earlier meeting Mr. Mubarak had with Mr. Assad earlier this week .

According to a secret Palestinian Authority report that was leaked yesterday to the Arab and Israeli press, Mr. Assad gave Damascus-based top officials of Hamas and Islamic Jihad the green light to renew attacks against Israel from within the territories.

Mr. Abbas has consulted with Mr. Mubarak on how to manage tensions with Israel following the country’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, but Israeli officials believe that Damascus wants the fighting to be renewed.

“Assad is under duress, and he intends to escalate the terror level,” Deputy Defense Minister Zeev Boim told Israel Radio yesterday.

The head of the Lebanese parliament’s defense committee, Walid Eido, yesterday urged the Beirut government to declare a national state of emergency, according to the Daily Star newspaper. Mr. Eido said that such a measure was needed after the Damascus-based leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, Ahmad Jibril, called on his terror operatives in refugee camps in Lebanon to be on “full alert” and to be “ready for mobilization at any time.”

A Washington-based pro-democracy group, the Reform Party of Syria, reported in February that when several Palestinian Arabs in the Syrian city of Aleppo failed to show up to work, their boss, a factory owner who supports the anti-Baathist party, said that he was told they were taken to Damascus to train for military attacks. The episode, according to the Reform Party president, Farid Ghadry, shows that Damascus has been long planning to launch terrorism from Lebanon. “Now we see the fruition of that maneuver,” Mr. Ghadry told the Sun.

After the Sunday meeting between the Egyptian and Syrian leaders, Mr. Mubarak’s spokesman, Suliman Awad, told reporters, “Egypt refuses to see Syria further isolated and believes that the region needs stability and not another center of tension,” according to Egypt’s al-Ahram newspaper. But the al-Ahram story also reported that Mr. Assad is under increased pressure because of indications that his operatives, as well as members of his own family, were involved in last February’s assassination of a former Lebanese premier, Rafik Hariri. The head of a U.N. investigation team, Detlev Mehlis, will report on the assassination to the Security Council on October 25.