Weekend violence leads to further talks on ceasefire

After yet another weekend of appalling violence at flashpoints across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israeli and Palestinian leaders…

After yet another weekend of appalling violence at flashpoints across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israeli and Palestinian leaders were yesterday grudgingly professing a readiness to meet with each other to try and forge a new ceasefire.

But so low are the mutual expectations, after almost 11 months of daily Intifada confrontation, that the latest idea being pushed by the Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, is for a "phased" reduction in violence - establishing calm in individual sections of the West Bank and Gaza, rather than attempting the evidently impossible task of halting the clashes everywhere.

At least three Palestinians were killed over the weekend - a Palestinian man shot dead by Israeli troops outside Nablus as he tried to evade an army roadblock, a Gaza teenager hit by Israeli gunfire as he threw rocks at soldiers, and an alleged "collaborator," presumably killed by Palestinian vigilantes, whose body was found at a garbage dump near Bethlehem.

A Palestinian activist and his two children, aged six and seven, were killed when a missile hit their house. Palestinians had claimed it was an Israeli attack, but Israel said Palestinian fighters had fired a mortar bomb at an Israel army outpost in the area, but it had missed its target and hit the house.

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The Palestinian wounded also included two babies: six-month-old Noor Odeh, badly hurt by Israeli gunfire near a Nablus roadblock, and three-month-old Faras Abu Mihmar, hit outside the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, according to Palestinian sources, when Israeli troops fired on the car in which he was traveling. The Israeli army denied that its soldiers had been in the area.

Khan Younis was a prime focus of attack and counter-attack all weekend: Palestinian mortar fire at nearby Israeli settlements was followed by Israeli tank fire, further Palestinian shooting, and then raids on Palestinian security positions by Israeli helicopter gunships.

Two Israeli civilians, meanwhile, were injured by Palestinian gunfire at a bus on the northern edge of Jerusalem, and a soldier was hurt during clashes in Hebron. In northern Israel, however, it was a weekend of relief, following the news that the army had intercepted two Islamic Jihad bombers on their way to a planned suicide bombing in a Haifa disco.

The arrests provoked angry confrontations in their home town of Jenin yesterday, where leaders of Mr Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and the radical Hamas Islamic group castigated the Islamic Jihad faction for dispatching the pair when, they said, it was clear in advance that Israel had sufficient intelligence information to thwart them.

On the diplomatic front, meanwhile, the indefatigable Mr Peres, apparently undeterred by Palestinian leaders' insistence last week that they would not meet with him until Israel relinquished control of the Orient House in East Jerusalem, declared that he would be meeting "in the near future" with the Palestinian President, Mr Arafat, to further a plan that calls for an area-by-area ceasefire and simultaneous easing of Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement.

Mr Saeb Erekat, the senior Palestinian peace negotiator, responded initially by saying there was no point in holding talks with Mr Peres, since he lacked a mandate from the Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, for substantive talks. But later Mr Erekat relented, and called on Mr Peres to "resume negotiations immediately".