Two Israeli brothers who travelled from their settlement to sell diesel in a nearby Palestinian village were shot dead and their bodies dumped in a quarry yesterday morning.
Responsibility for the attack was claimed by the Al-Aqsa Brigades, affiliated to Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. This is the same group that orchestrated a lunch-time suicide bombing at a fast-food stand in downtown Jerusalem yesterday. In a third incident, an Israeli settler overpowered and killed a Palestinian who tried to stab him and his wife in their bedroom.
The head of Israel's Shin Bet secret service, Avi Dichter, told a parliamentary committee that 12 planned attacks on Israeli targets had been foiled in the past few days - two suicide-bombers were arrested overnight, he said - and that he had intelligence on 60 more planned attacks. This unprecedented figure apparently reflects a concerted effort by Palestinian militants to avenge the killing of the Hamas military commander, Salah Shehade, and 16 other Palestinians in an Israeli air-strike in Gaza last week.
The brothers, Shlomo (60) and Mordechai (52) Odesser, drove their fuel tanker the short distance from their settlement of Tapuah outside Nablus, where they run the petrol station, to the village of Jammaien. They had reduced sales in the area over recent months because of security fears, but went to Jammaien, friends said, after a villager they knew telephoned them seeking fuel for a concrete factory. They were shot dead there at close range by two masked gunmen, local residents said.
The Jerusalem suicide bombing, the first in the city for more than six weeks, was at a falafel stand on the much-targeted Street of the Prophets. The 17-year-old bomber, who came from Beit Jala, south of the city, apparently detonated his device earlier than he had planned because of the heavy police presence; five people were injured - four lightly, one moderately.
"He didn't look remotely suspicious," said Ofir Yonah, one of the policemen who saw him approach. "Absolutely normal: black shirt, jeans, bag in his hand."
In a third incident, overnight, Orna Mimran, who lives at the settlement of Itamar, awoke to find a Palestinian man in her bedroom, knife poised, about to stab her husband. "We fought him off with our bare hands," she said, adding that her husband eventually overpowered the assailant and killed him with his own knife. The Shin Bet chief, Mr Dichter, told Knesset members that the Israeli army could withdraw from the Palestinian cities it has reoccupied for the past six weeks only when some kind of "buffer zone" was completed, to separate the West Bank from Israel in the way that the Gaza Strip is fenced off.
He noted that more than 80 suicide bombers had crossed into Israel from the West Bank, while only one had done so from Gaza.
Abdel-Razak Yehiyeh, the Palestinian Authority's Interior Minister who is responsible for the PA's security forces and has pledged to try to build an efficient apparatus to try and thwart the bombers, yesterday denied reports of a major falling out with the man who appointed him, Mr Arafat.
Mr Yehiyeh was said to have selected a new police commander and to have dismissed seven officers, only to have his orders overturned by Mr Arafat. But the Interior Minister said yesterday he had "no differences" with Mr Arafat and denied reports that he had cancelled his participation in a PA delegation to Washington for talks with Bush administration officials next week.
In Bethlehem yesterday, the Rev Jesse Jackson, the American civil rights leader, urged Mr Bush to "use the power of the United States" to foster reconciliation, end the Israeli occupation and help the Palestinians towards statehood.
On Monday he met with Mr Arafat, and declared that the President's call for a different Palestinian leadership was neither democratic nor smart. Mr Jackson is today set to call on the leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, at his home in Gaza.