Four Israelis have been shot dead by Palestinian gunmen who ambushed their cars south of Hebron, in the West Bank.
Earlier yesterday, on a day of violence in the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian man, who was sitting in his home in the town of Qalkilya, during an exchange of fire.
Also yesterday, an armour-plated Israeli bus was hit by a Palestinian missile in the Gaza Strip, and at least two Palestinians were badly hurt by Israeli gunfire when troops entered Gaza City and blew up several buildings which they said housed weapons factories.
Israel also buried a Russian immigrant who died of wounds sustained in last Wednesday's twin suicide-bombing in Tel Aviv, the attack's fifth victim.
The Israeli army was last night trying to track down the gunmen responsible for the Hebron killings. Survivors of the ambush said they had been fired on by Palestinians who were standing by the side of road. Three members of a single Israeli family, one of them a child, were shot dead in one car, and another Israeli man was killed in a second vehicle before the gunmen drove away. Hamas and other Palestinian factions have vowed to kill hundreds of Israelis in revenge for an Israeli air strike in Gaza City overnight Monday, in which the Hamas military commander, Salah Shehade, was killed, along with 17 other Palestinians, most of them children.
The Palestinian Authority Minister Mr Nabil Sha'ath said he would resume efforts to broker an agreement with Palestinian factions to end suicide bombings and other attacks on Israeli civilians - an effort he claimed was on the point of bearing fruit when shattered by the Israeli raid.
An aide to the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, dismissed as "nonsense" the idea that such a deal was close to hand. A spokesman for one of the most militant Palestinian factions, Islamic Jihad, said his group had never been prepared to honour any such accord.
However the Egyptian President, Mr Hosni Mubarak, has flatly accused Mr Sharon of deliberately timing the Gaza strike to torpedo the ceasefire contacts.
"The Israeli prime minister was doubtless not happy with these initiatives and efforts," Mr Mubarak asserted, "and said to himself, 'I'll carry out this attack at Gaza to sabotage all these efforts'."
The Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, countered this by saying that Shehade was eliminated now because he was planning a "mega-terror" attack in Israel, involving a lorry-load of explosives, "perhaps the biggest [attack\] Israel has ever seen".
European diplomats are also involved in the tentative ceasefire talks. Palestinian sources are adamant that at least some leading members of the Fatah Tanzim, a faction loyal to the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, were strongly in favour of a halt to the suicide bombings. There is considerably less of a consensus regarding suggestions that Hamas may have been inclined to back the deal.
Mr Mubarak's charge that Mr Sharon deliberately ruptured the ceasefire effort is not unprecedented. Most notably, critics of the Mr Sharon have claimed that last January's assassination of a Fatah militia head, Raed Karmi, was timed to derail fragile efforts to resume an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, during a lull which had followed a series of suicide bombings.
Aides to Mr Sharon flatly rejected that allegation at the time. They noted that Karmi was the self-acknowledged murderer of two Israelis, who were dragged out of a restaurant in Tulkarm.
They said the decision to target him had been taken earlier and was implemented when the opportunity arose.
In the wake of Karmi's death, Fatah militants began orchestrating an ever-higher proportion of suicide bombings, previously the province of the Islamic extremists.