IT WAS an example of genuine co operation. Israel's security services this week traced the Hamas gang responsible for last month's Tel Aviv cafe bombing, arrested two of its members, and asked the Palestinian Authority to find the others.
Mr Yasser Arafat's forces immediately captured two of them and the fifth and final member gave himself up to the Palestinian Authority yesterday.
But although Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, telephoned Mr Arafat yesterday to thank him for his role in the capture of the gang, which had been based in the West Bank village of Zurif, the success appears to have had no significant impact on the state of Israeli Palestinian relations.
Israeli intelligence chiefs still claim Mr Arafat implicitly encouraged the Tel Aviv bombing, and that he has yet to change the "green light" to red. Mr Arafat's officials are still making clear that full security co operation with Israel will not be resumed unless the Netanyahu government stops building work at Har Homa in East Jerusalem.
The Zurif cell, said Israel's Defence Minister, Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, was responsible not Just for the bombing at Tel Aviv's Apropo Cafe, but for the murders of five other Israeli civilians and three soldiers in the past year and a half. Among its victims was Mr Sharon Edri, a soldier who went missing last September, but whose disappearance was initially ascribed by police to "personal problems".
One of the Hamas gang members led the army on Thursday to the field at Zurif where they had buried him hours after kidnapping him in central Israel. He is to be given a proper funeral tomorrow. His family is furious at the police for doubting them. "It's like he was killed twice," said Mr Sharon's brother, Shlomo, yesterday.
Questioning of the captured gang members has also established that the Tel Aviv blast was not a suicide bombing, as was originally assumed. The bomber, Moussa Ghneimat, was driven to the cafe by a fellow member of the cell, and had hoped to make good his escape. But the device exploded prematurely. "There was a malfunction," said Maj Gen Uzi Dayan, the regional army commander.
As a married man with four children, Ghneimat had not fitted the conventional profile of past suicide bombers. What's more, he did not make a traditional Hamas farewell video, and he carried the explosives in a bag, rather than on a belt around his waist in the usual style.
While some Israelis will see the arrests at Zurif as proof of the need for a strong relationship with Mr Arafat and his security forces, and feel too that Mr Arafat was unfairly blamed over the Apropo blast given that the gang was based in territory still under Israeli military control, others take a different view.
Mr Ron Ben Yishai, a leading Israeli military analyst, noted yesterday that the cell had carried out no attacks for six months from last September. Was it mere coincidence that it "suddenly renewed its activities" in late March, he wondered, a mere 12 days after Israel alleges Mr Arafat met Hamas leaders and gave the "green light" for further attacks?
Mr Netanyahu acknowledged in interviews yesterday that he was contemplating inviting the opposition Labour Party leader, Mr Shimon Peres, to join him in a "national unity government". It is by no means clear, however, that a common platform could be agreed. Many Labour leaders blame Mr Netanyahu for the ongoing West Bank riots and the current parlous state of peace efforts.