With a week and a half to go before Israel's prime ministerial elections, a hitherto desultory campaign suddenly caught fire yesterday.
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were last night reportedly starting to draft a framework peace treaty. They apparently made dramatic progress on issues including the location of Jewish settlement blocs in the small percentage of the West Bank to be retained by Israel after a Palestinian state is established and, more remarkably still, on criteria for the limited entry to Israel of Palestinian refugees.
If progress is maintained, the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, and Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, may meet next week to try to finalise the framework accord, even though Mr Barak, publicly, continues to say that he believes there is little prospect for such an agreement. Mr Arafat may also hold talks at the upcoming Davos economic summit with former Israeli Prime Minister Mr Shimon Peres.
The talks, at Taba in Egypt, resumed at 5 p.m. yesterday, having been suspended for two days after the murders of two Israelis in Tulkarm. Two hours later, news broke that another Israeli had been killed - shot dead in a drive-by attack north of Jerusalem.
But the peace teams, this time, stayed at the negotiating table. Two Palestinians were also killed overnight in Gaza by Israeli troops who said they were trying to enter a Jewish settlement.
Mr Barak's readiness to sanction uninterrupted negotiations this time may well have been a consequence of the news that aides to Israel's would-be next prime minister, Likud leader Gen Ariel Sharon, held talks on Wednesday in Vienna with Mr Muhammad Rashid, one of Mr Arafat's closest advisers.
For weeks, Gen Sharon has been berating Mr Barak for sanctioning peace talks at a time of ongoing violence, and the Prime Minister was quick to charge his rival with hypocrisy. Gen Sharon was "preaching to the public" that it was immoral to hold peace talks at this juncture, he noted, yet at the very same time Gen Sharon's aides were "secretly running to foreign capitals, to hidden hotels, in order to talk and negotiate".
Gen Sharon insisted that there had been no negotiations - merely contacts, because Mr Arafat, having seen the opinion polls, "wanted to know what my positions are". But other sources suggested that Gen Sharon's representatives had passed word to Mr Arafat that it would be in his interest not to sign a peace treaty with Mr Barak, but rather to wait until after an anticipated Sharon electoral victory on February 6th.
Gen Sharon's camp denied this, and the candidate presumably knew the truth: his own son, Omri, was one of the participants at the meeting.
As for those polls, they continue to strongly favour Gen Sharon. Two surveys to be published today show him 18 per cent and 17 per cent ahead of Mr Barak.
Mr Larry Pope, a senior official on the Mitchell committee investigating the continuing AlAksa intifada, resigned yesterday. Israel had complained that he recently visited the Temple Mount, where the violence began almost four months ago, without co-ordinating the tour with Israel.