THE Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr David Levy, yesterday held two hours of warm, even convivial, talks with a man his party was until recently demonising as a conniving and unrepentant murderer, the Palestinian Authority's President Yasser Arafat.
Numerous handshakes, arm linking and smiles added up to body language almost as warm as anything witnessed in the four years when Yitzhak Rabin and Mr Shimon Peres were Mr Arafat's main political partners, before the change in government in May. Yesterday's body language utterly belied the thrust of the election campaign that brought Mr Levy and his Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, to office.
Before the elections Mr Arafat was portrayed in Mr Netanyahu's Likud party campaign advertisements as a dangerous trickster, still bent on Israel's elimination. However, yesterday Mr Levy described the chairman as "open", "willing to co-operate" and "strongly determined" to move the peace process forward.
Equally, Mr Arafat, who was in deep shock for several weeks after Mr Netanyahu's victory, spoke happily of the "positive dialogue", described this first meeting with a minister in Mr Netanyahu's government as a "success" and even sent "best wishes" to the prime minister who is still refusing to so much as talk to him.
Little of substance was achieved, but the significance of the meeting was clearly in the mere fact of its taking place.
The Palestinian leader did raise the issue of Hebron the West Bank city from which Israel is proving extremely reluctant to withdraw its forces and made clear there could no renegotiation of the issue.
The Israeli foreign minister, in turn, sought assurances that the Palestinians would halt "political activity" in Jerusalem and stop their security agents operating in the city.
Both sides promised co-operation on these issues. Mr Netanyahu said in the Knesset that he was nearing the end of his deliberations on the Hebron withdrawal. Mr Arafat noted that the French Foreign Minister, Mr Herve de Charette, would not be visiting the PLO's Orient House headquarters in Jerusalem during his current trip.
And, in accordance with the very best diplomatic traditions, Mr Levy and Mr Arafat agreed that the best way to resolve each side's complaints about breaches of existing accords was to set up a new "violations" committee.
Meanwhile, details of one of the shabbiest incidents in the chequered history of Israel's Shin Bet domestic intelligence service emerged yesterday, when a retired agent admitted that the cold bloodedly killed two Palestinians who had hijacked an Israeli bus 12 years ago.
In a newspaper interview marking his retirement from the service, Mr Ehud Yatom, whose brother Danny heads Israel's Mossad external secret service, said he was "proud" to have killed the two Palestinians.
The incident took place in April 1984 when four Palestinians hijacked an Israeli bus in the south of the country, seeking to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners. They ordered the driver to head for the Gaza Strip where the bus was stopped after soldiers shot out its tyres.
After hours of negotiation, soldiers stormed the bus and killed two of the hijackers in the process. The other two were photographed being led away for questioning, apparently unharmed, but the army later claimed they had died of injuries.
In a cover up that took two years to unravel, the Shin Bet tried to frame Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, the senior uniformed officer at the scene (and today Israel's defence minister) for the killing. But it was ultimately established that the two defenceless Palestinians had been killed on the orders of the then Shin Bet chief, Mr Avraham Shalom, who was forced to resign and was given a presidential pardon.
AFP adds; Amnesty International yesterday accused the Israeli armed forces of deliberately killing civilians in clear breach" of the rules of war during raids against Islamic Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon. In a report issued by its UN office, Amnesty said that according to its investigations into the killing of more than 100 civilians at Cana on April 18th, "available information indicates that the Israeli Defence Forces intentionally attacked the UN compound, despite Israeli claims that the attack was a mistake."