A tense session of prayers, marking the first Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, passed without major incident yesterday.
It came nine weeks after Israeli police killed six Palestinians during riots following Friday Muslim prayers atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, at the start of a conflict that has now cost almost 300 lives.
But any relief that the Jerusalem prayers - which saw tens of thousands of Palestinians from the city converge on the Mount's two mosques, al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock - had ended without bloodshed was tempered by a spate of further clashes in the West Bank and Gaza, in which three Palestinians were reported dead, one of them a 12-year-old boy.
Palestinian officials said that Mohammad al-Arja was shot dead by Israeli soldiers close to the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt; Israeli officials said there had been no shooting at all in that area. A fourth Palestinian died yesterday, of wounds sustained on Thursday.
In contrast to the last few Fridays, when Israel has barred worshippers aged under 45 from the Jerusalem prayers, no age restrictions were imposed yesterday. But Palestinians from the West Bank were prevented from entering Jerusalem altogether, prompting minor disturbances at several Israeli roadblocks on the city's perimeter.
The dispute over control of the Temple Mount has been at the heart of the so-called "al-Aqsa Uprising" of the past few weeks. The Palestinians demand full Islamic sovereignty over the compound, which they call the "Noble Sanctuary" or "Haram al-Sharif." Israel has claimed sovereignty over the area, site of the two ancient Jewish Temples, since it captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 war.
In a new peace proposal unveiled earlier this week, the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, suggested that the Jerusalem dispute be deferred, and that the two sides first try to reach agreement on the boundaries of a Palestinian state. But aides to the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, immediately dismissed the idea.
Mr Barak needs some kind of negotiating triumph if he is to prevail in general elections, set for next spring, forced upon him earlier last week by a parliament in which he no longer holds a majority.
Newspaper opinion polls published yesterday underlined the magnitude of his task. One survey placed him 17 per cent behind the likely right-wing prime ministerial candidate, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, even though Mr Netanyahu has yet to formally confirm his candidacy.
A second survey showed Mr Barak trailing 3 per cent behind Mr Shimon Peres, the former prime minister, in popularity within his own party.
A final date for the elections has yet to be fixed. And the election process itself is in flux, too. A majority of Knesset members are reported to be supporting a change in the system - cancelling the direct election of the prime minister, and reverting to a previous process under which the leader of the largest party in the House was given the first opportunity to try and form a governing coalition.
The direct election procedure, which took effect in 1996, was designed to stabilise Israel's multi-party parliamentary arithmetic. In practice, it has had the reverse effect, condemning Israel to three general elections in a mere five years.
Reuters reports from Beirut:
The militant Islamic movement, Hamas, urged Palestinians yesterday to escalate their uprising against Israel.
"Great people of Palestine: burn the ground under the feet of the invaders. Ramadan is a great month to escalate," Mr Khaled Meshal, head of the Hamas politburo, told a rally.