Amid deepening international concern, Israeli-Palestinian violence seemed to be spiralling out of control yesterday, with the death toll from five days of fighting close to 50 and every indication that further escalation was likely. However early this morning, AFP reported that a Palestinian security source said that both sides had reached an agreement for a ceasefire in the Palestinian territories.
As the UN Security Council met behind closed doors in New York last night, the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, said she would meet the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Mr Ehud Barak and Mr Yasser Arafat, in Paris tomorrow.
President Clinton said that the US was doing "everything we can" to stop the clashes. He hoped that, "when the smoke clears", the bloodshed of the last week might even advance the peace process by serving as a sober reminder of what the alternative was. Meanwhile Israel has moved tanks to the hillsides overlooking West Bank cities and is threatening to re-enter territory long since handed over to Palestinian control.
Jewish settlements are under virtual siege, their residents last night forbidden to leave by the army after a spate of Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilian vehicles on West Bank roads. Some towns and villages in northern Israel were also cut off as Israeli Arabs blocked roads and clashed with police in demonstrations of sympathy with the Palestinians across the nearby border. The rhetoric from each side is of angry bafflement. Mr Arafat urged Israel to "stop shooting our soldiers, our old people, our youths, our women".
He is said to be pressing for the removal of Israel's military presence from the disputed Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City, and the withdrawal of its forces from the outskirts of West Bank towns. Mr Barak, touring some of the combat zones in Gaza and the West Bank, implored the Palestinian leader to rein in his forces. International sympathy, however, is plainly with the Palestinians, who have borne the overwhelming brunt of the mounting death and injury toll.
President Jacques Chirac of France, which currently holds the EU Presidency, blamed Israel's opposition leader, Mr Ariel Sharon, for the "irresponsible provocation" that triggered the violence last Thursday.
Meanwhile a Palestinian minister, Mr Nabil Shaath, urged the European Union to provide international protection, including troops and observers, for Palestinians facing Israeli forces.
Along with the stones, petrol bombs, rubber bullets and tear gas all too familiar from the years of the Palestinian intifada a decade ago, heavier weaponry is being routinely employed in the latest conflict, and the combatants are speaking increasingly in terms of war.
Palestinians opened fire not just on Israeli soldiers all over the West Bank and Gaza yesterday, but on civilians too. Shots were fired into West Bank settlements and at a school bus carrying children between settlements.
The Israeli army, for its part, moved tanks to the hillsides outside Ramallah, Nablus and other West Bank cities and, for a second day, used assault helicopters and anti-tank missiles against Palestinian sources of fire.
Even as both sides were burying their dead, fresh fatalities were being added to the grim toll: a two-year-old Palestinian girl, killed in a hail of gunfire in the back seat of a car near Nablus, more Palestinian fatalities in Gaza and Jericho and at least six Israeli Arabs - two of them dying from wounds sustained on Sunday and two more in fresh clashes in northern Israel yesterday.