Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet was expected to meet Palestinian officials today to discuss a US plan to reshape their security services.
The CIA declined to comment on comments by a source close to the Palestinian delegation that Mr Tenet would hold talks with Palestinian Interior Minister Mr Abdel Razzak al-Yahya.
Among the reforms suggested are proposals to merge different branches of the security services run by Mr Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, to make them more accountable and able to rein in Palestinian groups responsible for suicide bombings and other attacks on Israelis.
Palestinian officials began high-level talks with Washington on Thursday on ending the violence - the first such contacts since President George W. Bush sidelined Mr Arafat in a June 24th speech and called for Palestinian reforms and democratization.
Security reforms and elections have been promised by Mr Arafat, under US and Israeli pressure, as preliminary steps towards reviving the talks with Israel on creating a Palestinian state which stalled in 2000. In his first public acceptance of foreign involvement in reforming his security apparatus, Mr Arafat said yesterday US, Egyptian and Jordanian officials would oversee the changes.
Israel accuses Mr Arafat of doing little to curb militants and his security system of having failed to stop, and even having abetted, the uprising led by Palestinian militants in the West Bank and Gaza.
"There is an agreement that Americans, Egyptians and Jordanians will come and administer the training of our security branches," Mr Arafat told Arab satellite channel al-Jazeera in an interview yesterday.
Asked if the programme would start in the near future, the 73-year-old former guerrilla leader said: "We hope so," but gave no timetable for implementation. He described the talks in Washington as "positive and constructive".
Any hands-on foreign role in Palestinian reforms may be risky for Mr Arafat as he faces challenges to his power from Islamic militants who have gained popularity by grabbing a central role in the uprising.
Meanwhile a Palestinian who had infiltrated Israel from the northern Gaza Strip was shot dead by Israeli troops today, an army spokesman said.
The man was carrying hand grenades which exploded when the soldiers shot him on the border between the Nir Am kibbutz and the Palestinian town of Beit Hanun, the spokesman said without naming the dead man.
Elsewhere an Israeli woman who was critically injured in a July 31st Palestinian bombing of a cafeteria at Jerusalem's Hebrew University died of her wounds on Saturday, her relatives said.
Ms Dafna Sprouch (60) had suffered serious head injuries from shrapnel when the bomb went off on Mount Scopus, killing two other Israelis, four US nationals and one French-American.