Israel is accelerating plans for a unilateral withdrawal of its troops from southern Lebanon, following the failure of US efforts to broker a resumption of Israeli-Syrian peace talks.
The Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, has pledged to dismantle the so-called "security-zone" that Israel occupies in Lebanon by early July, but had hoped to do so as part of an overall peace agreement with Syria and Lebanon. In the wake of the failed summit talks in Geneva on Sunday between President Clinton and the President of Syria, Mr Hafez Assad, the pullout may be advanced - possibly to May.
The Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr David Levy, is to hold talks in the next few days with the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, at which he will discuss the possibility of UN or other international forces patrolling the border after the Israeli pullout. This is to help to ensure that Hizbullah and other guerrilla groups with which Israeli is at war in southern Lebanon do not attempt to extend hostilities into northern Israel.
A unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon could exacerbate Israeli-Syrian tensions. Israel has warned that if Hizbullah and other guerrillas target northern Israel, its response might be directed towards some of the 35,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon, whom it blames for failing to rein in the gunmen.
US officials have privately warned that this could trigger a dangerous deterioration, hence Mr Clinton's effort to revive Israeli-Syrian peace talks.
Although Israeli and Syrian leaders are expressing near despair and trading recriminations over the failure to restart those talks, they still seem to hold out faint hopes of agreeing terms for a resumption. Mr Clinton, too, apparently does not regard the door to further progress as closed. "I asked him [President Assad] to come back to me with what he thought ought to be done," Mr Clinton said yesterday at a meeting with Egypt's President, Mr Hosni Mubarak. "So the ball is in his court now."
According to reports of the Clinton-Assad summit, the Syrian president is insisting not only on an Israeli withdrawal from the entire Golan Heights - which Mr Barak, it appears, would countenance - but also on access to the Sea of Galilee, which Mr Barak does not wish to grant him, and which the Israeli public overwhelmingly opposes.