Senior PLO officials said yesterday that the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, told President Clinton he would resign rather than bow to US pressure to accept Israeli proposals on a West Bank pullback.
Briefing his cabinet on last week's White House talks, Mr Arafat told ministers that Mr Clinton twice tried to persuade him to accept insignificant Israeli troop withdrawals, the PLO officials said.
"When pressed to accept Israeli proposals on further redeployment from the West Bank, President Arafat told Clinton: `I am not a traitor, I will not be a traitor, you can't force me to do that, I will resign'," a senior PLO official said.
"Arafat told Clinton that he would resign and if the peace process fails and chaos erupts after that, the US will have to face its responsibilities for that," another PLO official said.
In a proposal rejected earlier this week by Mr Arafat, Mr Clinton suggested that the Israeli withdrawal take place in phases, with each step matched by a new Palestinian action to improve security.
Palestinians have said they want Israel to pull back from at least another 30 per cent of the West Bank under interim peace deals, but Israeli news reports suggest that the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, refuses to go beyond 9.5 per cent.
PLO officials who attended the talks in Washington with Mr Arafat said the meetings failed to achieve any progress in the PLO-Israeli peace process which has been in deadlock for the past 10 months.
"But the Palestinians succeeded in preventing the Americans from adopting Israel's extremist positions which were aimed at destroying the Oslo accords," a PLO official said, referring to interim peace agreements signed since 1993.
PLO officials said they felt the present scandal plaguing Clinton had harmed US efforts to break the impasse. "President Clinton was distracted and the US was paralysed when we were in Washington. The US is keen only to show there is momentum but in reality it is incapable of pressing Israel to implement the deals," a senior adviser to Mr Arafat said.
The US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, will stop in Israel at the weekend to discuss Middle East peace efforts with Mr Netanyahu in Jerusalem and Mr Arafat in Gaza before going to Saudi Arabia and other regional states for talks on the crisis with Iraq.
"I'm sure that the main discussion will be about the danger posed by the Iraqi threat, but there is no doubt that we will also discuss the situation here," Mr David Bar-Illan, a senior member of Mr Netanyahu's staff, said.
Israeli soldiers shot and wounded a Palestinian who tried to throw a petrol bomb at them in the Gaza Strip yesterday, Israeli military sources said.
The incident began when dozens of Palestinians attempted to tear down an Israeli-built fence at the Katif block of Jewish settlements, the sources said.