The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, has made his most far-reaching commitment to date to the creation of an independent Palestinian state, but he warned the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, that this would have to be born out of negotiation, not violence.
Mr Barak's comments, contained in a letter to world leaders aimed at explaining Israel's position in the present hostilities, came on the eve of Mr Arafat's visit to Washington for a meeting with President Clinton and against the backdrop of yet more fatalities in the ongoing violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Mr Barak will also meet Mr Clinton, on Sunday, to discuss ways to end the violence which has so far claimed over 180 lives, most of them Palestinians.
Three Palestinians, aged 14, 16 and 18, were shot dead in clashes with soldiers at Gaza's Karni commercial crossing and at Khan Younis, local hospital officials said. A 14-year-old Palestinian was killed in Hares, a village in the West Bank.
The now routine night-time shootings, in which Palestinian gunmen target army outposts and Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, also continued on Tuesday night and into the early hours of yesterday morning.
An Israeli woman was killed and a man wounded when Palestinian gunmen ambushed their car while driving near the Israeli-controlled Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, where the two worked as customs officials.
Israel responded immediately by shutting the border crossing and by closing the nearby Palestinian airport from where the shots were reportedly fired.
In his letter, Mr Barak asked world leaders to impress upon Mr Arafat that Israel and the Palestinians "are at a crucial crossroads, facing two distinct possibilities. We could resume negotiations," the Prime Minister wrote, "which, based on the ideas discussed at Camp David, will lead to the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Or we can succumb to the route of violence, and unilateral Palestinian action."
While Mr Barak might have been trying to draw world support as well as offer the Palestinians an incentive to end their six-week-old Intifada uprising, the gesture also contained a veiled threat to the Palestinians: that if they unilaterally declare statehood, Israel would respond with a series of unilateral measures of its own. These could include a massive influx of troops into those parts of the West Bank still under Israeli control and the unilateral establishment of provisional borders. (At Camp David, Mr Barak reportedly offered the Palestinians a state in just over 90 per cent of the West Bank.)
In the strongly worded letter, Mr Barak also accused the Palestinians of abandoning the peace process for violence and chastised world leaders for not pressing Mr Arafat to observe a truce negotiated a week ago by the former Israeli prime minister, Mr Shimon Peres.
"I would like to make it completely clear," Mr Barak wrote, "that Israel is living up to its commitments, while the world is sitting quietly in the face of Palestinian rioting. This passivity is interpreted by the Palestinians as encouragement to step up the violence."
After deferring a planned declaration of statehood set for September 13th earlier this year, the Palestinians announced that they would convene on November 15th to again set a date for a declaration of independence.
But Palestinian leaders are now hedging, saying they do not plan to announce an exact date. That could be the result of Palestinian fears of the unilateral measures Israel would adopt - maybe even annexing part of the West Bank - in response to a unilateral declaration.
"I don't believe and I don't see a reason for speeding up the declaration of the state," a Palestinian Cabinet Minister, Mr Nabil Amer, said yesterday.
Mr Arafat held talks in Egypt yesterday before flying to Britain on his way to the US for talks with Mr Clinton today.