Two Palestinian gunmen drove into the northern Israeli town of Afula yesterday morning, and opened fire outside the central bus station, killing a mother-of-three and a young man, and injuring dozens, including five who were in serious condition last night.
The attack, carried out by one gunman from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO, and a second from the fundamentalist Islamic Jihad, occurred just as Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was briefing the visiting American envoy, Mr Anthony Zinni, who has been charged by the Bush Administration with brokering an intifada ceasefire.
Mr Sharon, who had taken the retired Marines general on a helicopter tour over Israel and the West Bank, ordered the chopper to fly over Afula, to provide his guest with an aerial view of ambulances evacuating the injured. "If Palestinian terrorists intended to give the US mission a complete example of what Israel has been facing for the last weeks and months, this is it," observed Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli Ambassador to the US and now a leading prime ministerial adviser.
In a second attack in the occupied Gaza Strip last night, Palestinian gunmen killed an Israeli woman. The two Afula gunmen, who were eventually shot dead by police and soldiers, came from refugee camps in the Jenin area.
Only hours earlier, in what was interpreted as a goodwill gesture to coincide with the start of the Zinni mission, Israel had finally bowed to American pressure and withdrawn its military forces from Palestinian territory in Jenin.
The gunmen - from the formerly rival Fatah and Islamic Jihad groups - filmed a joint video before setting out, and a joint statement was issued which described their "operation" as the "first fruit" of a "unified struggle that will make the lives of the Zionists hell until they leave our land."
The overt participation of a purported loyalist in an attack on civilians inside sovereign Israel was particularly unfortunate for Mr Arafat, the president of the Palestinian Authority, who is to hold talks with Mr Zinni today.
However, the Authority's cabinet secretary, Mr Ahmed Abdel Rahman, said Israel bore ultimate responsibility: "Within less than a month they have killed 56 Palestinians," he said. "So when there is a Palestinian response for such aggression, Sharon should blame himself."
Mr Zinni, said by Israeli sources to have done considerably more listening than speaking in the course of day's meetings with Israeli leaders, said only that the Afula attack "points out the importance of gaining a ceasefire." Mr Sharon reportedly told Mr Zinni that Mr Arafat was presiding over "a coalition of terror."