MIDDLE EAST: In what is being described as an effort to prevent violence from derailing the few remaining areas of Israeli-Palestinian co-operation, the Israeli government announced last night that it would this morning reopen the Erez border crossing.
A female Palestinian suicide bomber killed four Israelis, three of them soldiers, at the crossing yesterday morning. Four of the dozen people injured were Palestinians.
The explosion came just a few hours after an Israeli settler was shot dead by Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank. Mr Roi Arbel, a father of five, was killed on Tuesday when the car in which he was a passenger was attacked near Ramallah. Earlier a Palestinian gunman had been shot dead by Israelis in an exchange of fire at the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.
Amid this escalating violence, the Foreign Minister, Mr Cowen, today begins a three-day working visit first to Israel and then to Egypt, representing the European Union, one of the architects of the so-called road map to peace. The others are the US, the UN and Russia.
Last night, Mr Cowen condemned the attack. He said in a statement: "It has interrupted an extensive, although incomplete, cessation of violence which has been in place for a number of weeks. Such attacks do nothing whatsoever to advance the Palestinian cause."
The Erez crossing - where some 6,000 Palestinians work with Israelis at a joint industrial zone, and where a pre-Intifada flood of tens of thousands of Palestinian labourers into Israel has long since been reduced to a smaller stream of 15,000 - has been targeted half-a-dozen times in the past year, and nine Israelis have been killed at this and other Gaza crossings in that period.
Palestinian suicide bombers have tried relentlessly, but without success, to breach the fence that surrounds the Gaza Strip, and male would-be bombers have been intercepted several times. Those failures, the Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin said yesterday, had led him to reverse a previous ban on women carrying out suicide bombers. "It's easier for female fighters," he said.
Responsibility for the explosion was claimed jointly by Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, which is affiliated with the Fatah faction of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. The PA's Prime Minister, Mr Ahmed Korei, did not condemn the explosion, saying that Israeli attacks and restrictions on the Palestinians were provoking "more escalation on both sides".
Israeli security officials held consultations throughout the day yesterday on means for upgrading security still further at the crossing points. Officials were also meeting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ahead of preparatory hearings two weeks from now, at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, on the legality of the controversial security barrier that Israel is building in the West Bank - and whose construction in East Jerusalem, where parts of the Abu Dis neighbourhood are being walled off - has been accelerated in recent days.
The barrier is designed ostensibly to replicate the success of the Gaza fence in thwarting Palestinian suicide bombers attempting to penetrate into sovereign Israel. Israeli officials said attacks would underline Israel's main planned argument to the court, which begins hearings in earnest in late February, to the effect that Israel has the right, under international law, to take self-defence measures to protect its citizens from enemy attack.
The Palestinian Authority, which successfully urged the UN General Assembly to seek a ruling on the legality of the barrier from the International Court of Justice in The Hague, intends to counter that the barrier is largely being routed on West Bank land, rather than along the pre-1967 "Green Line" between what was then Israel and the Jordanian West Bank.