MOSCOW, 28 October — All of the 116 hostages who died as a result of the operation to free them at a Moscow theater were killed by the effects of gas that special forces spread through the hall before storming it, Moscow’s head city doctor said yesterday. The gas, which has not been publicly identified, was aimed at knocking out the more than 50 assailants who had stormed the theater Wednesday night and held hundreds hostage until the pre-dawn raid by special forces on Saturday.

Head city doctor Andrei Seltsovsky said 116 people died of the gas and that another was killed by the gunmen in shooting that sparked special forces to mount their raid to free the hostages. One other woman was killed by the gunmen in the early hours of the crisis.

The fatal effect of the gas apparently was magnified by the weakened condition of the hostages, who had spent 58 hours under enormous stress and with little food or water, anesthesiologist Yevgeny Yevdokimov said, according to the Interfax news agency.

As of last night, 646 of the released hostages remained hospitalized Seltsovsky said. One hundred and fifty of them were in intensive care and 45 "in a grave condition". Dozens of freed hostages were released from city hospitals yesterday afternoon.

The unidentified chemical was so powerful that the Chechen fighters had no time to detonate the explosives strapped to their waists.

Sergei, 36, who declined to give his family name, said after he was released from hospital that the gas had smelled slightly bitter. Chemical warfare experts say nerve gas often smells of bitter almonds.

London-based security expert, Michael Yardley, said he believed the gas used was BZ, a colorless, odorless incapacitant with hallucinogenic properties, first used by the United States in Vietnam.

He said the symptoms displayed by the hostages in Moscow — inability to walk, memory loss, fainting, heartbeat irregularities, sickness — all pointed to BZ. According to the US Army, the side effects last 60 hours, Yardley said.

"The Russians wouldn’t want a big shout about it because it (BZ) is just the sort of stuff they are not supposed to have," he said. "It’s not specifically banned, but...it is in a sort of gray area."

A US Embassy spokesman said that Washington had asked the Russian authorities to reveal what gas was used by the special forces. "We asked the Russian authorities about the type of gas used but we have not been informed. We’re still waiting for a response," the spokesman, who asked not to be named, said.

"We have a rescued hostage in the hospital and it’s relevant to her treatment," the official said, adding that US consular officials were talking to her doctors and US physicians were on the way to the hospital.

Film taken after the special forces stormed the theater to free more than 750 hostages showed a woman slumped back on a chair with her mouth wide open and a bag of explosives tied to her front.

"A panic went up among us and people were screaming, ‘Gas! gas!’ and, yes, there was shooting," theater director Georgy Vasilyev, one of the hostages, said.

"But then everyone fell down quickly. And then I was told by one woman while we were in hospital together, but who didn’t fall asleep immediately because she covered her mouth and nose, that it was very strange to look at everyone.

"You see, when the shooting began, they (the rebels) told us to lean forward in the theater seats and cover our heads behind the seats. But then everyone fell asleep. And they (the rebels) were sitting there with their heads thrown back and their mouths wide open."

One hostage told Interfax that he saw the guerrillas convulse and slump because of gas. "After the first shots at the hostages gas came in, I saw how a terrorist sitting at the scene jumped up and tried to get a respirator. I saw how he convulsed and tried to put the mask to his face and then fell," the unidentified witness said.

Among the dead were four foreign hostages. They were Natalja Zjirov, 38, a Dutch national of Russian origin; Alexandra Litiaga, a 13-year-old Kazakh girl; 55-year-old Lyudmila Bogacheva of Belarus and an Austrian woman.

Authorities had done little to ease the anxiety of hostage relatives after the raid, giving little information on hostage identities, what hospital they were taken to or what condition they were in.

Hundreds of hostage relatives crowded outside hospital gates hoping for clues. Some saw their loved ones waving to them from hospital windows, but the hospitals prohibited visits.

Irina Ramtsova waited outside the black iron gates of City Clinical Hospital No. 13 with pictures of her father, Fyodor, a trumpet player at the theater. "We keep calling and calling and there is no information," she said.

Like Ramtsova, many were unsure where their relatives were, and came because the bulk of the survivors needing medical attention — some 320 — were at that hospital. "They are hostages again," one of the relatives shouted to the armed guards behind the gate.

Three soldiers were killed when the Palestinian blew himself up at a West Bank Jewish settlement. Two Palestinian men were killed in a gunbattle with Israeli troops to the north in Nablus. A Palestinian teenager was also killed by an Israeli sniper in Jenin, under curfew after the army swarmed in on Friday.

After the bombing, claimed by the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of the Fatah, enraged settlers from a nearby Jewish community attacked Palestinian farmers and foreign peace activists trying to protect them. The group named the bomber as Muhammed Shkeir, 19, from Nablus.

The three soldiers were killed when they tried to tackle the well-dressed Palestinian bomber, spotted at a gas station at the entrance of Ariel settlement, halfway between Ramallah and Nablus.

Israeli media said it was possible a bullet fired by a soldier had detonated the bomber’s explosives. Medical sources said 17 people were admitted to hospital for treatment.

The blast was the second attack in a week, after two Palestinians from Islamic Jihad rammed an Israeli bus with a jeep packed with explosives last Monday, killing 13 Israelis.

Hours after yesterday’s bombing, a special Israel undercover unit raided Ras El Ayin in Nablus, although it was not immediately clear if the operation was linked to the attack.

Two Palestinians were killed in an exchange of fire that erupted when gunmen spotted the Israeli unit in an unmarked civilian car. The two were identified by Palestinian officials as Ahmed Jadallah, 24, and Ala Khadari, 23.

In Jenin, 15-year-old Palestinian Ahmed Abu Ghali was killed when an Israeli sniper shot him in the head after he stepped outside his house. The latest deaths bring the toll of two years of the Palestinian uprising to 2,622 people killed as a direct result of the violence, including 1,940 Palestinians.

The bombing coincided with Sharon’s biggest Cabinet dispute since taking office 19 months ago — a crisis over settlement-funding that threatened to shatter his ruling coalition. The Labour Party’s central committee gave its green light to the parliamentary faction to vote down the government’s austerity budget.

The committee, with more than 1,000 members, almost unanimously backed the motion by party leader and Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer, without saying whether deputies would actually vote it down in a parliamentary debate on Wednesday.

CAIRO, 28 October — Egypt and Saudi Arabia want Arab countries to work toward presenting a united front to the world, the Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said yesterday.

The comments follow Libya’s decision last week to withdraw from the Arab League in protest at what it said was the failure of Arab states to take a stronger stance against any US attack on Iraq and Israeli attempts to crush a Palestinian uprising.

"The feeling is mutual that we face difficult challenges which require gathering all Arab elements and capabilities to meet them," Prince Saud told reporters after talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

"The feeling of the two leaderships is that there is Arab weakness in confronting the issues facing them and that this doesn’t fit with Arab civilization and our Arab capabilities," he said.

The prince said he gave Mubarak messages from Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard.

He did not name any specific challenges, but Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are currently the top issues of concern in the region.

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said Saturday that he would deliver a message from Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi to Arab states outlining Qaddafi’s thoughts on what needed to be done by Arab states on Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most Arab countries — including Egypt and Saudi Arabia — oppose a war against Iraq and say any action should be taken under the auspices of the United Nations.

Prince Saud said the two leaders agreed that a special committee of Arab foreign ministers should meet soon to discuss efforts by the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union to resume Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

In a telephone call to Moussa, Lebanese President Emile Lahoud proposed the adoption of "a series of steps" to ensure Arab solidarity. Lahoud "proposed a series of steps that should be adopted, in cooperation with all Arab states to assert that solidarity," a Lebanese official source said.

The official said Moussa called Lahoud earlier in the day to inform him of his talks with Qaddafi.

Blix is to brief the Council today, the start of what US Secretary of State Colin Powell has said will be make-or-break week for efforts to unite the 15 members behind a resolution giving Iraq a last chance to accept a tough new inspection regime. The five veto-carrying permanent members are split into two camps over proposals to reinforce the powers of the inspectors and to threaten Iraq with military force if it fails to cooperate.

While few diplomats believe that France, Russia or China would veto the US-British proposals, the draft still needs nine yes votes to be adopted, and the 10 non-permanent members have had little opportunity so far to enter the negotiations.

They could be persuaded by what they hear from Blix, a highly respected former foreign minister of Sweden who came out of retirement to head the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) after the Council set it up in December 1999.

Blix has had several meetings this year with senior Iraqi officials, most recently four weeks ago in Vienna, when he met Amir El-Sadi, an aide to President Saddam Hussein, and agreed on arrangements for starting work in Iraq.

Blix previously ran the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is charged with supervising the dismantling of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program while UNMOVIC eliminates its chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles. His successor at the IAEA, Mohammed El-Baradei, is due to brief the Council with him.

"The tendency among all Council members is to let Blix and El-Baradei be the arbiters of this," a diplomat from one of the permanent members said. "What the elected members will want to hear is, do these proposals help or hinder you?" he added.

Another diplomat said: "Whatever Blix and El-Baradei want we will agree to."

Several Council members have suggested that the Council should limit itself to endorsing the arrangements agreed in Vienna, set out in a 20-paragraph letter to the Iraqis on Oct. 8, rather than thrusting new powers upon the inspectors.

The US proposals would originally have allowed the United States to put its own people on an inspection team, provide armed escorts for them and to take Iraqi scientists or officials and their families out of the country for interview. Under pressure from France and Russia, the United States diluted the proposals, giving UNMOVIC and the IAEA discretion to use their powers.

If the briefing with Blix and El-Baradei does help resolve differences over the inspectors’ powers, it could create the mood for consensus also on the other major disagreement. That is a US proposal to declare Iraq "in material breach" of its obligations under Resolution 687, defining the terms of the cease-fire which ended the 1990-1991 Gulf War, and threatening "serious consequences" for its failure to cooperate with UN arms inspectors.

"More attacks would be feared," if a new conflict over Iraq breaks out, said the minister at the end of a two-day visit to the Kingdom. "Apart from organized networks, individual acts (of terrorism) would be feared," and they would be "more difficult to predict and to fight against."

Alliot-Marie said she was more optimistic today than a few weeks ago about the Iraqi situation, putting the chances of war at "50-50". To avoid a conflict, "it is essential in concrete terms to destroy weapons in Iraq and the UN inspectors must be able to do their work in total freedom," she said.

"War is the worst thing. It must be the final recourse, that’s why we have to reach these targets without having recourse (to war)." Iraq was one of the main subjects of the minister’s talks in Riyadh, notably with Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, on Saturday. US efforts to force a tough new resolution to disarm Iraq through the United Nations face key tests this week with France threatening to submit counter-proposals.

The minister told Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper that Saudi Arabia and France enjoyed a "strategic partnership." "France and Saudi Arabia are linked by strong relations based on mutual understanding and a close partnership," she said. The partnership "is comprehensive and strategic because defense relations between the two sides have reached their highest level."

Alliot-Marie highlighted the importance of Saudi-French relations, and said she had exchanged views with Saudi officials on means of enhancing the pillars of stability in the region and combating international terrorism She commended the efforts exerted by the Kingdom in confronting terrorism, and said Saudi Arabia and France had agreed to enhance cooperation in this respect.