As Arab leaders began converging on Cairo for Saturday's first Arab Summit in four years, their host, President Hosni Mubarak delivered a message of moderation that will be music to the ears of the Israeli leadership and much of the watching world.
In what amounted to a devastating, albeit implied, rebuke to the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, and to the leaders of such hardline Arab nations as Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya, Mr Mubarak said that he had no intention of letting the Israeli-Palestinian violence of the past three weeks escalate into regional war.
He had called the Sharm al-Sheikh summit earlier this week, he said, "to save lives". Without the understandings reached there, the Palestinian "death toll would have been 200 or 300 by now", he said.
Libya's Col Muammar Gadafy yesterday read out on Qatari television what he claimed was the draft of the summit's final resolution, a mild document which does not call for countries such as Jordan and Egypt to sever ties with Israel. The Libyan leader mocked the document as useless to the Palestinian cause, and announced he was boycotting the summit.
Mr Mubarak observed angrily that "war isn't a game". His message to "those people who want to use this [Arab League] summit for war", he said, was that they were really asking to fight "to the last Egyptian soldier . . . and I'm not ready to do that".
A Muslim militant group involved in the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat yesterday urged the army to kill the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, and the US President, Mr Clinton if they set foot in Egypt again.
Mr Clinton and Mr Barak left the Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh on Tuesday after a two-day summit with Mr Arafat and Mr Mubarak.