A Palestinian gunman opened fire at a crowded bus on the northern edge of Jerusalem yesterday afternoon, killing a 16-year-old girl and a second Israeli and injuring dozens, including several schoolchildren.
The gunman, Haitham Shweiki (24), from the Islamic Jihad fundamentalist group, had travelled to Jerusalem's French Hill junction from Hebron - one of the few West Bank cities where Israel has not been maintaining a military blockade.
"He emptied an entire ammunition clip into the bus in seconds," said Jerusalem's police chief, Mr Mickey Levy.
Shweiki was shot dead by a civilian and by members of a border police unit that has recently been stationed at the crossroads, which has been the scene of several attacks.
Islamic Jihad, which is defying a ceasefire call by the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, vowed last night that "rivers of blood" would continue to flow.
Despite the attack, Israeli troops were withdrawing late last night from the West Bank city of Qalkilya. The pullback, Israeli officials said, involved units vacating several buildings they had occupied for more than two weeks, and tanks withdrawing several hundred metres. It was not clear whether the military blockade of the city would also be lifted. At a cabinet meeting yesterday morning, the Minister of Defence, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, told his colleagues that the army had nothing further to gain from its presence in Qalkilya and the other cities where they were still encamped on Palestinian land: Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus and Ramallah.
Late on Friday, an Israeli soldier was shot dead by Palestinian gunmen at a roadblock outside Ramallah.
Mr Ben-Eliezer said that dozens of militants had been killed or arrested since the troops moved in after the October 17th assassination, also near French Hill, of Israel's Tourism Minister, Mr Rehavam Ze'evi.
The Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, insisted at the weekend that he intended to bring the troops out shortly. His spokesmen, while confirming that Mr Sharon had postponed by three weeks a trip to the US and the UK, denied that this was because he preferred to avoid a confrontation with President Bush over the soldiers' continued presence in Palestinian cities.
Mr Sharon, in an interview with Newsweek, repeated his assessment that Mr Arafat was not a peace partner and that the Oslo peace process constituted "one of Israel's most tragic mistakes". Less typically, the Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, speaking in Mr Arafat's presence at a conference in Spain, directly appealed to him to "stop the shooting" by Palestinian militants at Israeli targets, and castigated him for insisting on a "right of return" to Israel for millions of Palestinian refugees. Such an influx would represent the end of the Jewish state, said Mr Peres, and Israel had "no intention of committing suicide".
Aides to Mr Arafat insist that he is arresting militants - even at the risk of destabilising his own regime. Indeed, Palestinian sources speak of growing tension within the authority, between those who want to escalate the Intifada and those who want to halt it, with Mr Arafat attempting to steer some kind of middle course and attracting displeasure from both sides. His Gaza security chief, Mr Mohammad Dahlan, is said to have either resigned or to be staying away from work. And his new Jerusalem diplomatic point- man, the philosophy professor, Dr Sari Nusseibeh, has tacitly criticised him, in much the same terms as Mr Peres, for failing to seek a compromise on the refugee issue at last year's Camp David peace summit.