The Camp David Middle East peace summit has moved into what all sides see as its most critical few hours, with President Clinton ready to leave tomorrow for a meeting of world leaders in Japan, and both Israeli and Palestinian opposition groups urging their negotiators to abandon the talks and come home.
Breaking the week-long American-imposed media blackout at the summit, President Clinton yesterday gave an interview to the New York Daily News, in which he underlined how complicated it is proving to chivvy Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, and the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, toward a permanent peace treaty: "God, it's hard," he said. "It's like nothing I've ever dealt with."
Expressing no particular confidence that a treaty would result, he added that the negotiations were more difficult than talks on Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and even previous phases of this same Middle East process.
Mr Barak and Mr Arafat, in contacts with some of their advisers in the US and back here, have given similarly weary assessments of the progress so far, each inevitably blaming the other for a perceived failure to grasp the historic moment and compromise.
Tellingly, as the President noted in his newspaper interview, both leaders are only too aware that, should they somehow manage to strike a deal, they will bring it home to ferocious opposition. "What's really troubling," said Mr Clinton, "is that they know if they make a peace agreement, half of their constituencies will have to be angry at them for a while . . . My heart goes out to them."
Indeed, following a mass demonstration by settlers and other right-wing opponents of Mr Barak at a rally in Tel Aviv on Sunday night, it was the turn of the Palestinian opposition to voice its concerns yesterday.
Three delegates of Palestinian splinter factions, who had been called to the US for consultations with the official Arafat-led team at the talks, were last night preparing to fly home, dismissing the prospects of an acceptable treaty emerging.
And in Gaza, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, leader of the Islamic extremist Hamas movement, called on Mr Arafat to leave Camp David. Any deal struck there would "be a failure", he said, "because it is not what the Palestinians are looking for".
Were Mr Arafat to accept Israeli proposals on the future status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugee rights of return, the sheikh warned, "it would be the end of him politically". Israel's state television re ported last night that the Americans, desperate to broker progress at Camp David, had now tabled a series of "bridging proposals", but that these amounted to familiar formulas and the Palestinians had rejected them.
The competing Channel 2 news asserted, by contrast, that considerable progress had been made in the latest sessions of the talks - with tentative agreement on an Israeli handover of 90 per cent of the West Bank, various "land swaps" to enable Israel to extend its sovereignty to the larger settlements, a formula for the return to Israel of several thousand Palestinian refugees, and talk of "religious sovereignty" and "municipal autonomy" for the Palestinians in Jerusalem.
Needless to say, there was no official confirmation of either the optimistic or the pessimistic assessment. But Ms Dalia Itzik, the Israeli Environment Minister who spoke to Mr Barak yesterday, said she had "reason to believe" that the summit would adjourn later this week with no agreement, but would reconvene a short time later.