A day after President Bush for the first time backed the idea of an international observer force in the Middle East, Israeli leaders yesterday retained their traditionally cool attitude to the idea, while the Palestinians tried to press home their new diplomatic edge.
The Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, did not rule out some form of monitoring mechanism for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but he emphasised that Israel had yet to receive a formal proposal and that, anyway, it had the veto right regarding any observer force. "We have never given an absolute `no' to the idea," he told Israel Radio yesterday. "But will Hamas and Islamic Jihad allow the observers to enter their headquarters? Underground activity cannot be monitored. What can be filmed is our response [to these attacks]."
Mr Peres was echoing one of Israel's traditional objections to international intervention in the conflict - that an observer force would limit the ability of the Israeli army to respond to Palestinian violence, while being unable effectively to monitor underground Palestinian armed activity. Israeli leaders have argued that agreeing to an international force would be a diplomatic prize for the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, whom they blame for the violence.
But some cracks have appeared in the Israeli rejection of international monitors. The Defence Minister, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, said on Friday that if Israel had no choice, it might agree to an observer force as long as it was exclusively American - a sentiment echoed by Mr Peres yesterday. "We never opposed monitoring activities, but not observers like there are in Lebanon and other places," Mr Peres said, referring to the multinational composition of UNIFIL forces in south Lebanon.
At the G8 summit in Genoa, leaders on Saturday backed the deployment of an observer force in the territories, saying that third-party intervention would help reduce the violence.
Mr Arafat, who has long sought international intervention, was in Amman yesterday, where he met with King Abdullah of Jordan in an effort to initiate an Arab summit to focus on what he called Israeli aggression and to press for international monitors. A Palestinian government statement released late on Saturday night called on the international community to send observers "immediately in order to spare the blood of the Palestinian people".
A Palestinian intelligence chief, Mr Amin el Hindi, asserted yesterday that the Israeli military build-up in the West Bank and Gaza, which followed a suicide bomb blast in northern Israel last week in which two Israelis were killed, was aimed at undermining the Palestinian Authority and reoccupying the areas under its control. Mr El Hindi warned that the Palestinians had a contingency plan for countering an Israeli incursion.