Midlde East: Israeli and Palestinian officials are spending the weekend drawing up lists of Palestinian prisoners to be released from Israeli jails.
Extremist Palestinian groups want all of the thousands of prisoners freed as a condition for maintaining a week-old intifada ceasefire.
The Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Mr Mahmoud Abbas, has urged Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, to release a "significant" number or risk the collapse of the truce, and his Minister of Security, Mr Mohammad Dahlan, has cited a list of 416 long-term inmates as a first priority.
On the Israeli right, and among many Israeli families who have lost relatives to Palestinian violence, there is heavy pressure on the government not to release convicts with "blood on their hands". The word from Mr Sharon's office is that several hundred people will be freed, most of them detainees who have not been charged, or prisoners nearing the end of their terms.
The issue is likely to top the agenda at tomorrow's Israeli cabinet meeting, where the Shin Bet security service will present its register of suggested releases, and at talks set for later next week between Mr Sharon and Mr Abbas.
Although it seems unlikely that there will be full agreement (the two sides cannot even agree on how many prisoners there are: Mr Abbas says 8,000; Israel says fewer than 6,000), Mr Sharon is said to recognise the importance of a large number of releases to Mr Abbas's credibility with his own people. Several dozen prisoners have been freed over the past three days, most of them recent detainees against whom no charges had been pressed.
The PA prime minister and his colleagues argue that they, not Israel, are now capable of arresting and jailing those who would seek to shatter the fragile truce.
After anti-tank shells were fired at an Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, for instance, injuring four Israelis, Mr Dahlan's 17,000-strong security force in Gaza made a reported five arrests in Gaza City and Khan Younis.
In a sign of displeasure, Palestinian gunmen and several dozen supporters marched in Gaza City late on Thursday night and opened fire into the air, deliberately and ominously, near Mr Abbas's home and Mr Dahlan's office.
Mr Abbas and Mr Dahlan have vowed to arrest anybody who violates the ceasefire, but they are resisting American and Israeli demands that they aggressively confront and dismantle extremist groups such as Hamas for fear of prompting a Palestinian civil war.
An Israeli cabinet minister, Mr Tsachi Hanegbi, acknowledged earlier this week that, in essence, Israel was calling for precisely such an internal war to be waged by Mr Abbas as the only means of achieving long-term calm and a basis for substantive peace negotiations.