MR Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority president, told Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo yesterday that Israel had "declared war" on "an unarmed people". His minister of information, Mr Yasser Abed Rabbo, speaking in Gaza, called the Israeli killing of Abdullah Salah (21), during clashes outside Ramallah on the West Bank on Saturday, "an act of war".
With no end in sight to the daily routine of Israeli Palestinian confrontation, the West Bank is looking increasingly like a war zone, with Israeli tanks deployed outside Palestinian cities, and Palestinian officials talking of 400 people injured since the clashes began a week and a half ago.
Yesterday was actually a "relatively" calm day in the recent annals of Israeli Palestinian violence. Israel had been braced for intense and widespread disturbances as both Palestinians and Israeli Arab citizens marked "Land Day".
But although Israeli Arabs held a series of marches, denouncing the Netanyahu government, there was little trouble. For just about the first time since this round of West Bank violence began Israeli officials acknowledged that the Palestinian police force was making a concerted effort to prevent serious escalation.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, for example, hundreds of Palestinian policemen formed a protective ring around Joseph's Tomb, an isolated Jewish seminary where six Israeli soldiers' were killed during fighting last September. This time, the Palestinian policemen fired into the air and drove back demonstrators.
In his speech to Arab League ministers considering a halt to all normalisation processes with Israel, Mr Arafat referred to a 1991 letter he had from the then US Secretary of State, Mr James Baker, which stated that Israel would not be allowed to alter the demographics of Jerusalem before the city's final status was negotiated.
By pressing ahead with construction at Har Homa in East Jerusalem, Israel was defying that letter and the terms of the peace accords, he said. By vetoing UN efforts to stop the construction, he indicated, the Americans were breaching their own commitments.
An adviser to Mr Arafat, Mr Ahmad Tibi, added that there could be no Netanyahu Arafat summit until Israel reversed the decision to build at Har Homa. And while Mr Netanyahu told Newsweek he still believed he and, Mr Arafat could rebuild their mutual trust, he firmly ruled out nay such volte face. There is thus little prospect yet for a halt to the daily violence.