The Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, is expected at the White House today for talks with President Clinton on his latest Middle East peace proposals, the White House said last night.
Mr Nabil Abu Rdainah, a senior aide to Mr Arafat said: "There was a telephone call between President Clinton and President Arafat concerning the American ideas and especially the clarifications that we asked for."
Meanwhile the killing on Sunday of the right-wing extremist, Mr Benjamin Kahane and his wife, Talia, shot dead by Palestinian gunmen when driving in the West Bank, has raised Israeli-Palestinian tension to new heights, prompting a full alert in the Israeli security services against right-wing revenge actions such as a feared attack on the mosques of the Temple Mount.
Five years after the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing extremist, right-wing anger has also yielded overt threats against the life of the current Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak.
Jerusalem was cleaning up yesterday after a funeral march for Mr and Mrs Kahane that brought thousands of mourners into the city centre, and saw a series of attacks by Jewish extremists on Arabs they happened to encounter.
Three Palestinians were beaten up in a motor parts store. A supermarket on the funeral route had its windows smashed, and hundreds of would-be attackers, screaming "Death to the Arabs", tried to enter the store to confront a handful of Palestinians who worked there. An Arab taxi-driver was attacked at the entrance to the city, as the mourners neared the cemetery.
Outside the Prime Minister's residence, in the unusually tranquil Rehavia neighbourhood, marchers stood and screamed "Death to the Arabs. Death to Barak", and one man urged "Kill him, kill the traitor. Hang him, Ehud the murderer". The "mourners' rituals", observed the Israeli newspaper columnist Nahum Barnea, "were very similar to the pictures they've been watching on television from Gaza and Ramallah."
Israel's Public Security Minister, Mr Shlomo Ben-Ami, acknowledged that the situation had reached "boiling point" and said his forces were on full alert, in anticipation of right-wing acts of revenge. The most feared scenario, it appears, is an attempt to blow up Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount - a move that could spark all-out regional war.
Mr Kahane was driving with his family between Jerusalem and his home in the settlement of Tapuah early on Sunday morning when his car came under fire. He and his wife were killed. And his five daughters were injured as the vehicle crashed. One of the five was still in intensive care last night.
In the West Bank yesterday, Palestinian sources said that a Palestinian man was shot dead by settlers firing from a passing car. Settlers in the area where Mr Kahane was killed blocked roads to Palestinians. And about 1,500 settlers gathered to erect a new outpost on the site of the shooting.
In other violence, the commander of Mr Arafat's Fatah movement in Tulkarm, Thabet Thabet, was gunned down outside his home on Sunday - about the 10th in a series of apparent Israeli army killings of targeted Intifada activists.
Two Palestinian policemen were also killed yesterday in the Tulkarm area, Palestinian sources said, a 10-year-old child was killed in exchanges of fire in Hebron and the Israeli army had last night yet to explain why a soldier had shot an unarmed, middle-aged Hebron man in the foot.