For the first time in a week of clashes, Palestinian policemen moved conspicuously yesterday to halt a further upsurge in West Bank violence.
A two-year-old Israeli child was in intensive care in an Israeli hospital, having been severely burned by a petrol bomb hurled as the car she was travelling in passed through Jericho early yesterday morning.
In response, Israel barred its citizens and tourists from entering Jericho and other Palestinian-controlled West Bank cities, and ordered its negotiators to break off a round of peace talks that had been taking place in Sweden.
The Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, who has postponed a trip to Washington for talks with President Clinton because of the violence, told his ministers he had demanded that the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, intervene to stop the clashes.
Amid reports that Mr Arafat had ordered his policemen to act more forcefully to quell the violence and prevent any further exchanges of live fire, hundreds of policemen formed a human chain to prevent protesters approaching Israeli positions on the outskirts of Ramallah yesterday afternoon, when 7,000 Palestinians attended the funeral of Mr Issa Abed (28) who was shot by Israeli troops on Friday and died a day later.
Mr Abed was one of at least four Palestinians killed last week. When some protesters threw rocks at the policemen, the policemen threw them back. The policemen also intervened at other West Bank and Gaza flashpoints, where protests - which began about 10 days ago in support of demands for the release of Palestinian security prisoners - were markedly less intense than last week.
Many analysts believe the Palestinian violence is linked to an upsurge in Hizbullah attacks on Israeli targets in south Lebanon. Israel is pulling out of south Lebanon over the next few weeks - largely as a consequence of the losses imposed on its forces there by Hizbullah.
That is a lesson, said Aharon Barnea, an analyst with Israel's Channel 2 television, that has not been lost on Palestinian activists, pushing to accelerate Israel's withdrawal from the rest of the occupied West Bank. Fighting continued in south Lebanon yesterday, with some Hizbullah shells landing across the border in northern Israel. Electricity supplies were down in parts of northern Israel on Saturday, because Hizbullah shells hit power lines.
Israel staged two air raids in Lebanon yesterday, having bombed 10 tanks belonging to a Palestinian rejectionist group, the PFLP-GC, on Saturday - in a raid unusually close to the Syrian border. Three PFLP-GC members were reportedly killed.
King Abdullah of Jordan held talks with Syria's President Hafez al-Assad in Damascus yesterday on the stalled Syrian-Israeli peace talks, and Syria urged Israel to endorse full withdrawal from the Golan Heights to achieve peace.