Despite initial assumptions to the contrary, Israeli police believe the murders of two Israelis yesterday afternoon outside the village of Nataf, near Jerusalem, were a consequence of a criminal feud rather than the latest manifestation of Arab-Israeli violence. Because the killings took place on a road just inside the Israeli border from the West Bank, and given the current dire state of Israeli-Palestinian relations, first Israeli news reports intimated that Islamic extremists could be to blame, and Palestinian villages in the vicinity were sealed off. Israeli police chiefs last night, however, said indications were of an underworld killing - a moneychanger murdered and robbed, and a passer-by who witnessed the killing then murdered as well.
Israeli and Palestinian officials, meanwhile, are preparing the ground for next week's first visit to the region by the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright. Both sides have sent high-level delegations to Washington for consultations, and each is doing its best to make clear why all blame for the collapse of the peace process attaches to the other.
Palestinian officials are demanding a halt to Israeli settlement expansion, and an on-schedule withdrawal by Israel from further West Bank land within the next few days. Israel disputes that any such further withdrawal is due, and the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, is still pronouncing himself dissatisfied with Mr Yasser Arafat's efforts to fight the Islamic militants and thus disinclined to countenance new peace moves.
American officials have been downplaying the likely impact of the Albright visit, indicating that she will not be issuing dire threats to either side for failing to toe the line. She may sympathise with the Palestinian call for a settlement freeze, but is hardly going to pressurise the Netanyahu government so soon after the July 30th Jerusalem suicide bombings.
Still, Israel will not have endeared itself greatly to the US this week by briefly arresting the American head of an American-funded road-building project in the West Bank city of Hebron. Mr David Muirhead has been supervising the repair of Shuhada Street, in the town centre, in advance of the Albright visit, and got caught up in an incident involving Jewish settlers and Palestinian workers there. Israeli police say he cursed officers and tried to prevent the arrests of two workers.
Mr Muirhead, who was arrested on Tuesday, freed, but questioned again yesterday, said one settler fired a pellet gun at a bulldozer and that workers have been attacked 10 times by settlers without police intervention.
David Horovitz is managing editor of The Jerusalem Report