THE MIDDLE EAST: As the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, flew into Israel last night, the Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, issued a series of firm preconditions for the withdrawal of troops from the West Bank, which would seem to put him on collision course with the Bush administration.
Two weeks into the "Operation Defensive Shield" offensive he launched in the wake of a series of suicide attacks inside Israel, Mr Sharon declared that the army would not pull back from the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat's besieged Ramallah headquarters until several men also inside, alleged by Israel to have purchased weaponry for the PA and to have orchestrated the murder of the Israeli tourism minister last October, came out and surrendered - something Mr Arafat has vowed will not happen.
Furthermore, the prime minister said, soldiers were "not about to leave" the other major West Bank cities - Bethlehem, Jenin and Nablus - until all pockets of armed resistance had been quieted, "and all the terrorists have surrendered".
Even then, they would only withdraw to the outskirts of the cities, he said. A further pullback to "security areas" would only be authorised, he indicated, after a prolonged period of calm.
And in the clearest definition yet of those security areas, or "buffer zones", which he has said he will establish inside the West Bank along the Israeli border to prevent suicide bombings, Mr Sharon was quoted as saying the zones would be some five kilometres wide.
Not only are such conditions entirely unacceptable to the Palestinians - who have demanded a full Israeli withdrawal from areas entered in the past two weeks as their precondition for a ceasefire effort - they are manifestly unacceptable to Mr Powell as well. Aides to Mr Sharon were pleased to hear Mr Powell and other Bush administration officials softening their language yesterday when discussing the need for an Israeli pull-out, no longer employing the phrase "without delay". They attributed this to the partial withdrawals sanctioned by Mr Sharon in recent days - from Tulkarm and Qalkilya and some two dozen smaller population centres - and to a lobbying effort led by the former Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, on Capitol Hill.
Nevertheless, Mr Sharon's demands can hardly strike Mr Powell as anything but unhelpful, particularly when Israeli troops are still periodically entering fresh areas of Palestinian-controlled territory in their hunt for intifada activists, and when evidence of the devastation the fighting has wreaked in places like Nablus and Jenin becomes daily more plain.
The army is still maintaining a "closure" order in Jenin refugee camp, where most accounts suggest that at least 100 Palestinians - mainly gunmen, but civilians as well - have been killed over the past week.
But the Palestinians were yesterday burying some of the 70 bodies of those killed in Nablus. And both residents of the Jenin camp, who had fled the fighting, and Israeli soldiers, spoke dramatically of bodies left out in the street for days, and of large numbers of homes demolished - in the course of the fighting, and by the army, to enable tank access and to prevent booby-trapped bomb explosions of the kind that killed 13 soldiers on Wednesday.
Ms Karin Abu Ziyad, the deputy head of UNRWA - the United Nations Relief and Works Agency which provides aid for the refugees - said that some 3,000 people had lost their homes in the fighting. Palestinian Authority, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad spokesmen, have alternated between describing the warfare in Jenin as "heroic resistance" by gunmen and an Israeli massacre. Israeli officials have insisted that they tried to prevent civilian casualties and that they were confronting the intifada "hardcore" responsible for many suicide bombings.