US and European envoys are fighting an uphill battle to formalise a stable Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire, following the killings on Saturday of three Bedouin women in their tent in Gaza by Israeli tank fire.
But while the various envoys shuttle between Jerusalem and Ramallah, eyeing a visit by President Bush to Stockholm on Thursday as an ideal opportunity to unveil a formal truce, Israel is obsessed over the call issued at a conference in Syria yesterday by of one of its own parliamentarians, a former prime ministerial candidate at that, for an intensification of the Arab struggle.
The CIA chief, Mr George Tenet, who is spearheading the ceasefire effort, postponed until today an Israeli-Palestinian-US security meeting, which was to have been held in Ramallah last night, because the Palestinian Authority has yet to respond positively to the formal ceasefire plan. Israel has raised what it calls "only minor objections" to the plan.
Mr Tenet, along with the US Middle East envoy, Mr William Burns, the Swedish Prime Minister, Mr Goran Persson, and other diplomats and ministers, has been holding talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders on the plan which, apart from a complete cessation of violence, provides for Israel to withdraw its forces to the positions they held before the eruption of the Intifada last September, an ending of the Israeli blockades of Palestinian cities, an end to "anti-Israeli incitement" in the Palestinian media, and the confiscation of illegal weaponry and arrest by the Palestinian Authority of some two dozen Islamic militants alleged to have orchestrated violence against Israel.
The Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, last night was meeting his ministers and security chiefs to discuss the plan, which he is reported to have characterised as an Israeli document, camouflaged by the Americans. After meeting Mr Persson, Mr Arafat said bitterly that Israel was "still maintaining its blockade, and still killing our civilians".
The killings to which he referred came late on Saturday night, when three Bedouin women, Ms Nessra Malaha (65), Ms Salimia Malaha (46), and her niece, Ms Hikmet Malaha (17), were hit by Israeli tank fire in their tent near the settlement of Netzarim in the Gaza Strip. Four other relatives were also injured.
The Israeli army said its forces had come under fire, and the deaths were an apparent mistaken consequence of their return shelling.
Mr Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi, a Hamas official, said the deaths proved that Israel "only understands murder and killing, and our only option is resistance".
Similar sentiments were being expressed by speakers at a ceremony in Syria yesterday marking the first anniversary of the death of President Hafez Assad, in the presence of his son and successor, President Bashar Assad.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, head of the Hizbollah movement, vowed that there could be "no olive branch for the enemy, only the blood of gunfire", and that resistance would not end until "all of Palestine" was freed from Israeli occupation, "including every last grain of holy sand in Jerusalem".
Most striking, however, was the speech by Mr Azmi Bishara, an Israeli-Arab Knesset member and failed 1999 prime ministerial candidate, who declared that the Israeli government of Mr Ariel Sharon was presenting the Arab world with the choice between "accepting the Israeli terms [for diplomatic accords] or regional war". What was needed, said Mr Bishara, was an Arab strategy that would enable a widening of "the resistance" and "the struggle".