Anxious to promote an image of moderation ahead of Mr Ariel Sharon's talks with President Bush at the White House today, Israeli leaders indicated yesterday they had effectively called a halt to construction at Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
A senior Palestinian negotiator, Mr Saeb Erekat, countered this however, noting that Israel had published tenders for 2,900 homes at Har Homah - a neighbourhood on West Bank land claimed by Israel, on the southern edge of Jerusalem.
Despite this construction, and the government's recently approved plans for several hundred more housing units at two existing West Bank settlements, the Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, told a Labour Party meeting that "settlement construction is frozen, even if there has not been a detailed announcement" to that effect. The future of the existing 200,000 or so settlers, Mr Peres continued, would involve either their "evacuation" - to homes inside sovereign Israel - or their "concentration in a particular area" - a presumed reference to the blocs of settlements on a small percentage of West Bank land that Israel has said it hopes to annex in any permanent peace accord.
Speaking in similar vein, the Defence Minister, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, demanded that settlers dismantle 15 "outposts" constructed illegally in recent months, often at spots where settler motorists have been killed by armed Palestinians. If the outposts were not removed voluntarily, said Mr Ben-Eliezer, he would "use force" to dismantle them.
While his colleagues were confronting the settlement issue, the Prime Minister was preparing for a meeting today at which he will seek Mr Bush's continued backing for his demand that violence cease "100 per cent" before there are any moves towards a resumption of peace negotiations.
Mr Erekat, by contrast, called yesterday for the speediest possible resumption of such talks, against a background of further West Bank violence.
In the worst clashes for weeks in Hebron, Palestinian snipers fired on Jewish settler homes in the city centre, lightly injuring one child, and Palestinian and Israeli forces then exchanged gunfire for more than an hour.
Eight months after two army reservists were lynched by a Palestinian mob in a Ramallah police station, Israel says it has arrested the Palestinian youth photographed at the police station window waving his bloodstained hands in celebration of the murders. Israeli officials said the suspect, Mr Aziz Tzalakha (20), had admitted choking one of the soldiers.
In Paris, President Bashar el-Assad warned that the peace process was in danger of collapse because "the culture of peace is not yet ripe in Israel." French Jewish community leaders, Catholic and Protestant clerics and politicians from left and right led a protest against his visit.