The Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, has said he can still hold negotiations with Israel's Prime Minister-elect despite his claim that Mr Ariel Sharon tried to kill him 13 times in Beirut in 1982.
"Can I talk to him? I talked to Prime Minister Barak who came to assassinate me in Beirut in 1973 when they killed [Palestinian] officials Abu Yousef al-Najjar, Kamal Nasser and Kamal Adwan," he said.
Mr Arafat claimed Mr Sharon had tried to kill him 13 times during the 1982 siege of Beirut when he had to keep constantly on the move to escape Israeli jets bombing buildings in the belief that he was inside.
He would give his old adversary a chance. "We have to wait and see," he told Reuters in an interview in English. "We will judge him according to policies he takes as prime minister, and with whom he will form a government."
There were further violent incidents in the Palestinian territories yesterday. A roadside bomb exploded as an armoured Israeli convoy drove along a road near the Kfar Darom Jewish settlement in Gaza. Israeli troops fired tear-gas at Palestinian stone-throwers during minor clashes in Hebron.
Meanwhile, a national unity government for Israel could be formed "within days", according to a senior negotiator taking part in talks between the mainstream Likud and Labour parties. "I think they [Labour] want to join," the Likud mayor of Jerusalem, Mr Ehud Olmert, told Israeli Army Radio.
A new round of talks between the two parties began yesterday. Labour's Mr Shimon Peres indicated that the party had been offered a choice of two out of three prize ministries: defence, foreign affairs and treasury. A Nobel Peace prize-winner, Mr Peres is in the running for the foreign minister position.
A UN human rights team met Mr Arafat in Gaza on Saturday at the start of a week-long inquiry into human rights violations in the occupied territories. A commission member, Mr John Dugard, told reporters: "Unfortunately the Israeli government has indicated it will not co-operate with us."
Elsewhere, a Palestinian military court sentenced an alleged "collaborator" to death after he was found guilty of assisting the Israeli army. There was whistling and clapping in the court room when a tribunal of three judges sentenced Hassan Mohammed Hassan Musalam (55) to be shot by firing squad. Musalam was a security officer in the West Bank.