Talks to try to defuse the crisis in the Middle East carried on into the early hours in the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh today as some differences between the Israelis and Palestinians seemed to have narrowed.
A closing session would be held at around 10 a.m. (9 a.m. Irish time) today, an Egyptian delegation spokesman announced. The announcement set off a countdown for agreement.
Yesterday, thousands of Palestinians poured onto the streets of the towns and cities of the West Bank and Gaza towns and cities yesterday to protest against the summit. "We are in the midst of very delicate discussions," an Egyptian spokesman, Mr Nabil Osman, said this morning. "They are still continuing, which means there are points of difference that must be ironed out."
A European diplomat said the two sides had made some progress on other issues, but remained at odds on a Palestinian demand for an international inquiry into what caused the unrest. Israel says it will only accept a US-led fact-finding mission.
Two more Palestinians - one of them a boy - were shot dead in clashes with the Israeli army, taking the death toll in less than three weeks to 109. Israel closed the border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt after gunfire between Palestinian and Israeli forces. Scores of demonstrators were wounded when Israeli troops opened fire on stone-throwing crowds.
Palestinians in Lebanon's southern refugee camps also held rallies. Concern that the talks could fail and cause the violence to spill over into the rest of the Middle East led President Clinton to postpone his return to the United States in the hope that some agreement could be brokered during a second day of meetings.
Despite an appeal by President Clinton to look to the future rather than focus on who was to blame for the current violence in Israel and the occupied territories, an atmosphere of mutual recrimination and suspicion at the summit led to stony faces and "difficult" meetings between the various parties throughout the day.
By late yesterday sources at the summit were saying it would be a major achievement to even agree upon the terms for a cessation of violence.
Mr Clinton and the other leaders in attendance, who included President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, the EU foreign affairs chief, Mr Javier Solana, and King Abdullah of Jordan, held a flurry of bilateral meetings with the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, and the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, in an attempt to close the gaps between the two sides.
The two leaders sat at the same table during a multilateral meeting and, later at a lunch by President Mubarak, but although they did manage to shake hands at one point during the day, their attitude towards one another was described as chilly.
Basic points of disagreement between the two sides still focussed on how to determine the causes of the violence and ways to end the unrest.
The Israelis also called on the Palestinian leader to order an immediate halt to the violence and rearrest more than 65 Islamist militants freed last week.
For their part, the Palestinians demanded that Israel end the closure of the occupied territories and that Israeli troops pull back from their positions there.
The acrimony during the talks was such that a foreign ministerial meeting to agree on measures to halt the violence turned into a shouting match when the Palestinians insisted that the unrest was caused by the "provocative" visit of Mr Ariel Sharon, the right-wing Likud leader, to the holy sites in Jerusalem on September 28th.
The Israelis countered that Mr Arafat had orchestrated the clashes.