Palestinian officials reacted with astonishment and fury on Monday after the leak of hundreds of secret documents on a decade of peace talks with Israel.
The cache of documents, the first set of which were revealed by Al-Jazeera on Sunday night, contain potentially damning revelations on the amount of land in annexed east Jerusalem that the Palestinians were willing to cede to Israel.
And the hundreds of documents, dating from 1999 onwards, also reveal that Israel gave the Palestinian leadership advance warning before it launched a devastating 22-day invasion of Gaza in December 2008.
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The revelations have infuriated the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, already weakened by years of failure to win a peace deal with Israel and the deadly rout of its forces in Gaza in 2007 at the hands of Hamas.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, who heads the Fatah party, voiced astonishment at the leaks in talks with Egyptian journalists in Cairo on Sunday night, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
He said Palestinian negotiators had never sought to hide the terms of their peace talks with Israel from Arab neighbours.
"With everything we have done -- in terms of activities with the Israelis or the Americans -- we have given the Arabs details," Wafa quoted Abbas as saying.
"There is nothing hidden from the Arab brothers."
Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat reacted furiously, accusing Al-Jazeera of a smear campaign and saying the documents were "out of context and contain lies."
"We don't have anything to hide, and I reiterate that Al-Jazeera's information is full of distortions and fraud," he told AFP from Cairo, where he was accompanying Abbas for talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
In Ramallah, foreign minister Riad al-Malki held a press conference to address the leaks and accused Al-Jazeera of standing "beside Israel and helping them in their attempt to finish off the Palestinian Authority."
He said the Qatar-based channel was trying to incite an uprising similar to the one that toppled veteran Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
"Al-Jazeera got very enthusiastic about what happened in Tunisia and wants the same thing to happen in other places, including here," he said.
"But here the situation is very different, because we connect with our people and any attempts at destabilisation will not work."
At a separate press conference, senior Abbas aide Yasser Abed Rabbo reserved his anger for Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, accusing him of authorising "a campaign" against the Palestinian Authority.
"It was a political decision made at the highest political level in Qatar," he said, adding that the Palestinian Authority would not punish Al-Jazeera or its reporters.
Shortly afterwards, dozens of Palestinian youths demonstrated outside Al-Jazeera's office, fighting with security forces who sought to keep them out of the building. They burned an Israeli flag with Al-Jazeera written on it.
In an unusual step, the UN's special Middle East peace envoy Robert Serry issued a statement defending Palestinian officials.
"I can personally attest to the commitment of the Palestinian leadership to secure the legitimate rights and interests of the Palestinian people," he said.
The documents, released late on Sunday on the websites of Al-Jazeera and British daily the Guardian, are the first of some 1,600 secret files relating to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Those published so far threaten to undermine the already fragile standing of Abbas and his negotiators stand accused by rival Hamas of supporting the Israeli occupation.
Sami Abu Zuhri, spokesman of the Islamist Hamas movement which rules the Gaza Strip, said the documents revealed the "ugly face" of Abbas's Palestinian Authority and "the level of its cooperation with the occupation."
"These secret documents that were presented by Al-Jazeera are serious," he told AFP.
They showed "the Fatah Authority's involvement in attempts to liquidate the Palestinian cause, particularly on the issue of Jerusalem and refugees."
