The US special Middle East envoy, Mr Dennis Ross, is to hold talks today with the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, and the senior Palestinian negotiator, Mr Saeb Erekat, in what has now become a race against time to salvage peace hopes.
The President of the Palestinian Authority, Mr Yasser Arafat, is now intimating that his oft-repeated September 13th deadline for declaring statehood may be postponed. But even if the PLO's Central Committee, to convene in Gaza in early September, does delay that deadline, it is unlikely to extend it beyond the end of the year, and other deadlines are looming that also limit the negotiators' room for manoeuvre.
President Clinton has been heavily involved in the effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, but his term of office is coming to a close, while the political future of Mr Barak - who showed a greater willingness to compromise at last month's Camp David summit than any previous Israeli leader - now hangs by a thread.
Even if Mr Barak, who now heads a minority coalition, manages to stay in power through the Knesset's current summer recess, he cannot reasonably expect to last long when parliament reconvenes at the end of October.
"We have a few weeks left, until mid-to-late September," Mr Ran Cohen, of the left-wing Israeli Meretz party said yesterday. Mr Nabil Sha'ath, the Palestinian Minister of Planning, agreed, albeit citing the end of September as the cut-off point.
Despite the time pressure, the two sides are still arguing publicly about who is to blame for past failures. Mr Jibril Rajoub, the Palestinians' West Bank security chief, yesterday urged Israeli leaders to "recharge their batteries and reconsider their positions". Mr Shlomo Ben-Ami, the acting Israeli Foreign Minister, who met Mr Ross yesterday, declared that "the Palestinians have to move" if there is to be any progress.
And arguments are also now breaking out within the negotiating teams themselves as to whether the quest for a full, permanent peace treaty should be set aside altogether, and efforts focused instead on achieving yet another interim deal.
This deal might resolve the modalities for an agreed Palestinian declaration of statehood, mark out the borders, allocate water rights, and detail the dimensions of settlement blocs and security zones to remain under Israeli sovereignty in an otherwise fully-Palestinian-controlled West Bank. "Such a deal is in both sides' interest," said Mr Cohen, who served until recently as Israel's trade minister.
But an interim deal would probably leave the status of Jerusalem and the issue of Palestinian refugee rights of return still in dispute, and could thus not formally mark the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For this reason, Mr Barak is understood to be determined to achieve a permanent deal, and is expected to repeat this to Mr Ross today.
At his talks with Mr Ben-Ami, the US envoy discussed the notion of holding a "pre-summit summit", at which second echelon leaders from the two sides would convene in the US, to formulate the terms of an agreement that Mr Barak and Mr Arafat could then fly in to sign.
The Israeli army yesterday apologised for shooting dead Mr Mahmoud Abdullah (73), mukhtar of the village of Surdah, near Ramallah in the West Bank, on Wednesday. Israeli commandos, who were carrying out a predawn search in the village, thought they were under fire from Mr Abdullah, the army said. Mr Abdullah's family said that he had heard noises, and fired his pistol at what he thought were thieves.