Defying President Bush's call to begin withdrawing from Palestinian areas, Israel widened its West Bank offensive yesterday, with troops fighting their way deeper into several cities and refugee camps in its effort to smash what officials now call "Yasser Arafat's terrorist infrastructure".
Palestinian sources said 20 Palestinians were killed in the fighting, most of them armed men in Nablus, and around the Jenin refugee camp to the north, where an Israeli soldier was also killed. A 13-year-old girl and her older brother were killed in the town of Tubas, and at least five Palestinians were injured in Hebron by an Israeli missile that missed its target - a key militant from the Islamic Jihad group.
At the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, dozens of clergymen, several Palestinian officials and an unconfirmed number of armed Palestinians - including, Israeli officials say, those responsible for orchestrating last Friday's suicide bombing in Jerusalem - remained under siege, although four priests managed to slip out of the building.
A Vatican spokesman, Father David Wieger, said the men had "neither asked for nor been granted" refuge inside, but had burst in, guns blazing. Giacomo Bini, an official speaking from Rome, blamed both Israel and the Palestinians for desecrating the site.
The Israeli onslaught, launched after the March 27th suicide bombing in Netanya that killed 26 Israelis, is prompting ever-wider protests in the Arab world and beyond. There were anti-Israeli and anti-US demonstrations yesterday in Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Turkey and Iran, with Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggesting that Arab oil exporters should halt supplies to countries friendly with Israel, as a "symbolic" act.
In his White House address on Thursday, apart from urging Israel to withdraw its forces and the Palestinian leadership to fight terrorism, President Bush denounced Iran's "arms shipments [to Hizbullah and Palestinian groups] and support for terror". At an Arab League foreign ministers summit scheduled for Cairo today, Jordan and Egypt are likely to come under renewed pressure to sever diplomatic relations with Israel - a step President Hosni Mubarak has indicated he does not intend to take.
Despite the President's volte-face - Mr Bush had earlier indicated tacit approval for Israel's "self-defence" activities in the West Bank - Israeli officials made clear yesterday that the military offensive would continue at least until the arrival of the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, next week and quite possibly beyond.
They said that, as a result of the West Bank invasion, there had been no suicide bombings since Monday, although an Israeli woman who died of injuries in a bombing in Tel Aviv last Saturday was laid to rest yesterday. Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, is seeing his personal support rise, too; 62 per cent of Israelis now say they support his policies, up from 45 per cent last month.
The threat remains of escalating hostilities on the Israeli-Lebanon border, where Hizbullah again targeted Israeli positions in the Mount Hermon region and at the single disputed border point, the Har Dov/Sheba Farms area, in defiance of a call to desist from the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, who oversaw Israel's withdrawal from Lebanese territory two years ago. Israel responded last night with air raids and tank fire on Hizbullah positions.
Earlier yesterday, the Lebanese government indicated it was working to prevent cross-border fire by Palestinian groups, had made several arrests and was sending army patrols to border areas, but there were no signs of confronting Hizbullah in Beirut.
The UN Human Rights Commission has voted to send its commissioner, Mrs Mary Robinson, to the region on an immediate fact-finding mission.