At least seven Palestinians died yesterday, further straining an already shaky Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire.
Palestinian hospital officials said three people had been killed by some kind of explosion in the southern Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt. They said two other people remained in critical condition from the blast, which Palestinian officials and militants blamed on Israel.
Four other Palestinians died yesterday: an Islamic Jihad activist apparently blown up by his own bomb in Hebron; another man shot dead in the same city by Israeli troops; a teenager was killed when soldiers fired on stone throwers in the village of al-Khadar; a man died of wounds sustained in clashed in Ramallah last week. Several more Palestinians were injured elsewhere in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and four Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs opened substantive talks yesterday on enforcing a ceasefire, the "al-Aksa Intifada" reached its first anniversary much as it has passed the entire year, with protests and clashes and bloodshed.
On Wednesday, during ceasefire talks with the Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat renewed his commitment to thwart attacks on Israeli targets. But Mr Marwan Barghouti, the head of Mr Arafat's Fatah faction in the West Bank, was adamant yesterday that the Intifada would go on. The Intifada, he said, was "not a leader they the Israelis can assassinate or a house that they can demolish."
The mood on the Palestinian streets yesterday appeared to confirm the sentiment: minutes of silence in memory of the victims, followed by demonstrations in most major cities. A portrait of Osama bin Laden featured prominently at one march in the West Bank; chants of support for more suicide bombings went up in Gaza, from a crowd of 6,000.
But Mr Jibril Rajoub, the PA's West Bank's security chief, sounded a different note as he went into the security talks with colleagues and Israeli counterparts in Tel Aviv. "This isn't the time for jihad," he said simply.
On this anniversary, the Intifada seems to be poised between the militancy of Mr Barghouti and the despair of Mr Rajoub, with Mr Arafat in between. If he were truly to confront the Islamic extremists, he would win praise from the Bush administration, which would probably pressure the Sharon government towards concessions. But to do so, he would have to act against the pro-Intifada feeling of his people and endanger his regime.