AT about 10 p.m. on Thursday a horse galloped into the settlement of Neveh Dekalim, a small Jewish outpost in the heart of the overwhelmingly Palestinian Gaza Strip. The Israeli soldiers on guard duty, fearful that the animal had been loaded with explosives by Islamic extremists, opened fire and wounded it.
Still perturbed that it might somehow constitute a booby-trapped living bomb, sappers then blew up the unfortunate beast.
There were no explosives. There was no bomb. The horse, now dead, had been innocent.
The sorry demise of that horse underlines just how jumpy the Israeli security forces are in Gaza and the West Bank at present. And no wonder.
While the Palestinian Authority initially tried to suggest that Israel was to blame for one of the two botched suicide bombings in the Gaza Strip last Tuesday, the militants of Islamic Jihad have now acknowledged responsibility.
Had the bombers found their targets and killed dozens of Jewish schoolchildren, not even the optimists would today be talking about the disintegrating peace process.
They would be using the past tense; the process would be over; and the Israeli army might even have re-invaded parts of the two-thirds of Gaza that the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, controls.
The two Gaza bombs, the explicit, repeated threats of more attacks by Islamic Jihad, the fresh memory of the Tel Aviv suicide bombing a fortnight ago, the failure of Mr Arafat to arrest the key figures in the Hamas and Islamic Jihad infrastructure, the refusal of Mr Arafat publicly and unequivocally to condemn the Tel Aviv blast, and the intelligence information strongly suggesting that Mr Arafat has been at least tacitly encouraging the extremists - all these have left the government of Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, and much of the Israeli public, nursing a keen sense of betrayal.
Mr Arafat, the once-reviled PLO chief rehabilitated by the late Yitzhak Rabin only on condition that he renounce and vow to combat terrorism, is widely seen in Israel, even among moderates, as having slipped back into old ways.
And ordinarily Israel would have expected to find the US firmly in its corner, backing up its accusations against Mr Arafat, threatening to withhold aid to the Palestinians, loudly urging Mr Arafat to get back on the straight and narrow.
But these are not ordinary days for the Israeli-US relationship. Mr Netanyahu is having an extremely hard time coming to terms with it. But the fact is that, no matter how sympathetic the Clinton administration is to Israel's charge of Palestinian betrayal, a goodly part of the blame for the two weeks of violence that have again brought the region to the brink of full-scale confrontation (and that continued yesterday in Hebron and elsewhere) is being levelled by the US directly at Israel's hardline government.
As he prepares to depart tomorrow for the US, to meet first with King Hussein and then with President Clinton, Mr Netanyahu is equipping himself with documentation designed to "prove" that Mr Arafat, in a late-night meeting with Hamas leaders on March 9th, created the impression that he would not be averse to more bombings, that the Palestinian president has yet to reverse that impression, and that he has issued firm orders to his West Bank and Gaza security chiefs, Mr Jinril Rajouh and Mr Muhammad Dahlan, to eschew co-operation with their Israeli counterparts in the fight against the bombers.
Mr Clinton, the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, the US peace talks mediator, Mr Dennis Ross, and others will doubtless listen carefully, and possibly hold another round of strongly-worded telephone conversations with Mr Arafat.
But no amount of Israeli evidence will deflect the full weight of US anger. Barely two months ago Mr Ross returned from weeks of patient negotiation, euphoric that the Israeli partial military withdrawal was finally agreed.
The peace process, the State Department and the White House believed, was finally "back on track." The US could turn its attention to Russia, to NATO, to China, and at last leave the Middle East on the hack-burner for a change.
But then Mr Netanyahu ordered his bulldozers to start clearing the ground for a new Jewish neighbourhood, 6,500 homes at Har Homa in East Jerusalem. And it was crisis time again.
Mr Netanyahu did not want to make this trip, his fifth as Prime Minister, to Washington. He knows he will be pressed to moderate his policies.
And while yesterday reiterating his offer to enter six months of intensive, Camp David-style talks aimed at producing a final peace arrangement with the Palestinians, he has been thoroughly non-conciliatory regarding Har Homa and other settlement building.
On Thursday he told a Likud audience: "The era of Israeli good will gestures is over" and "the era of Palestinian good will gestures has begun."
To strong applause, he declared that his government "will not capitulate to the dictates of terrorism or to threats, and we will continue to build at Har Homa in Jerusalem, and in the settlements."
Mr Netanyahu had barely got off the phone from Mr Ross late on Tuesday night, having indicated that he wasn't sure he would be going to the US, than Mr Clinton was telling reporters at the White House that he "expected" to see the Israeli Prime Minister.
Essentially, therefore, Mr Netanyahu was summoned. In the background, US diplomats here have been quoted anonymously using almost unprecedentedly harsh language to describe Mr Netanyahu's policy-making over Har Homa, blaming him for plunging Israel's standing to "catastrophic" and "disastrous" depths.
No joint press conference has been scheduled to summarise the Clinton-Netanyahu meeting; it is unlikely that there will be any scenic photo opportunities of the US President strolling through the grounds with his Israeli guest.
Theirs will be serious talks, make-or-break talks. King Hussein, whom Mr Netanyahu will visit tomorrow as he recuperates from prostate treatment at a Minnesota clinic, may have a crucial role to play.
He, too, has been on the phone to Mr Arafat, advising him to restore security co-operation with Israel; he, doubtless, will be urging Mr Netanyahu to call a halt to settlement building.
But it is the Americans, and only the Americans, who have the leverage to force Mr Netanyahu and Mr Arafat into line, to instruct them to get past their mutual loathing and mistrust, and to commit themselves to the only strategic decisions that can prevent a slide into another Middle East war: Mr Arafat to rejoin the battle against the Islamic extremists, Mr Netanyahu to promise that there will be no repeat of Har Homa.