One Palestinian blew himself up trying to kill Israelis at a West Bank restaurant yesterday, and another was shot dead when attempting to stab an Israeli inside a West Bank settlement. A third was shot dead by a gunman from his own people, caught in the crossfire as he worked in the greenhouse of a settlement in the Gaza Strip, as the final Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan yesterday saw yet another upsurge in Middle East violence.
It was unclear last night whether an Israeli had also died in the first of these incidents, the suicide bombing near the settlement of Mehola, towards the northern edge of the West Bank. At least three Israelis were hurt in the attack, one of them badly. There were also exchanges of fire in and around Hebron and Ramallah, and scuffles in Jerusalem, as Palestinians arrived for, and departed from, prayers atop the Temple Mount. Israeli police acknowledged beating up three journalists who were covering the Jerusalem events, and promised an investigation.
The new deaths mean that more than 340 people have been killed in almost three months of conflict, almost 300 of them Palestinians. Ominously, the unexpectedly upbeat assessments from earlier this week of the progress of peace talks in Washington - talks designed to end the violence and attain a permanent peace accord - are gradually being replaced by a more more pessimistic tone.
Asked whether an accord was in prospect, Mr Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority President, said yesterday: "We hope so." But Mr Arafat is not in Washington. Mr Saeb Erekat, his chief negotiator, by contrast, said that the talks were deadlocked on all major issues. And reports have been leaking out about a near punch-up between negotiators, after the Israelis apparently attempted to backtrack from an earlier offer to relinquish more than 90 per cent of the West Bank.
In similar vein, the sides also reportedly clashed furiously over claims to the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif, with the Palestinians deriding the notion that the First and Second Jewish Temples stood there. "The Western Wall is holy, take that," one Palestinian negotiator reportedly told the Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr Shlomo Ben-Ami. "But the Haram al-Sharif is Muslim, holy to Muslims, with mosques atop it. It has nothing to do with you."
If these talks end in failure, the violence on the ground can be expected to intensify still further. And there will be clear implications too for Israel's Prime Ministerial elections, on February 6th. An opinion poll published yesterday shows the Likud opposition leader, Gen Ariel Sharon, to be 18 per cent ahead of Prime Minister Ehud Barak; only a dramatic breakthrough in Washington is likely to turn those figures on their head.
The same poll showed former prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres to be 4 per cent more popular than Gen Sharon. But those findings are irrelevant, since Mr Peres is out of the race. Mr Peres failed to even launch his planned prime ministerial bid on Thursday, when the left-wing Meretz party declined to nominate him.