MIDDLE EAST: On another day of bloodshed and funerals in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, was quoted as saying that he now accepted former President Bill Clinton's proposals for a permanent Israeli-Palestinian treaty and believed he could make peace with the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon. David Horovitz reports from Jerusalem
To that end, Mr Arafat reportedly told the Ha'aretz daily, he was prepared for a deal that saw Palestinian statehood throughout Gaza, in almost all of the West Bank and in most of East Jerusalem - but not the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, which would remain under Israeli sovereignty.
He would accept "territorial exchanges" that would enable Israel to annex small blocs of West Bank settlement, the newspaper indicated, and he was not insisting on a previous deal-breaker - a "right of return" to Israel for up to four million Palestinian refugees.
There was no mention of Mr Arafat's position on another deal-breaker - the status of the Temple Mount.
Mr Arafat had effectively rejected the Clinton blueprint during talks in 2000 and early 2001 with the then-Israeli prime minister, Mr Ehud Barak.
However, while Mr Barak accepted it as a basis for negotiation, his successor, Mr Sharon, opposes many of its clauses, and rejects Mr Arafat as a partner.
Mr Arafat's reported comments came against a backdrop of some of the heaviest violence of the 21-month Intifada conflict.
In Jenin yesterday, an Israeli tank shell killed four Palestinians, three of them young children, who had come out to shop in the mistaken impression that a curfew had been lifted.
An army statement said the tank crew had intended to deter people from approaching, and that it had acted in error.
Also in Jenin, Palestinian officials reported the death of a 14-year-old boy, apparently killed overnight when the army blew up a building it said housed a bomb-factory.
At Itamar, a Jewish settlement south of Nablus, thousands of Israelis attended the funerals of four members of the Shabbo family, a mother and three of her young sons, shot dead by two Palestinian gunmen who stormed into their house on Thursday.
Also buried was the fifth Israeli fatality of the same attack, a security officer. Following the funerals, Palestinian witnesses said that a group of settlers rampaged through the nearby village of Hawara, shooting dead a Palestinian man, and setting fire to a house. In the Gaza Strip, an eight-year-old Palestinian boy was killed by Israeli troops, soon after an Israeli soldier was critically wounded by an anti-tank missile fired at his position.
Meanwhile, at the Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel, a Palestinian man threw a hand-grenade and fired on Israeli troops, who fired back, killing him and two Palestinian labourers standing nearby. Throughout the West Bank, Israeli troops are now deployed deep inside Palestinian cities, in what is looking ever-more like a replica of April's massive "Operation Defensive Shield".
That offensive was launched in an effort to halt daily Palestinian suicide bombings in late March.
This month has seen a similar upsurge in bombings, with two such attacks in Jerusalem this week killing 26 Israelis.
Many senior Israeli officials, including the Defence Minister, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, acknowledge that the military incursions, with their accompanying mass arrests and curfews, deepen Palestinian hostility.
However, they say they have no other means to try and track down the bombers and their explosives factories since they allege that Mr Arafat is making no effort to thwart them.
Mr Arafat's West Bank security chief, Mr Jibril Rajoub, effectively confirmed as much earlier this week, saying that there would be no effort mounted against the bombers so long as the Israelis were deployed inside the Palestinian cities. Mr Sharon has asked for legal advice about deporting the bombers' families and those orchestrating the attacks.
His aides are now "clarifying" that the army is not being instructed to recapture Palestinian cities for the long-term, but rather will remain deployed there until the "threat of terror" passes.
This appears to represent a backtracking from a statement issued earlier this week by his office, which indicated plans for the semi-permanent reoccupation of Palestinian cities as a punitive measure.
- President Hosni Mubarak has warned that any "unbalanced" statement by PresidentBush in laying out his vision for peace would seriously damage US interests in the region, the Egyptian press reported.