His coalition collapsing around him, a no-confidence motion looming in the Knesset next Monday, Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, last night announced that he would probably have to dissolve his government and call early elections.
Mr Netanyahu also made clear that Israel would not hand over another portion of occupied West Bank territory to the Palestinians tomorrow, as stipulated under the Wye River peace accord, and issued a list of demands upon the Palestinian Authority as preconditions for any further peace progress.
The halt he has now called to the peace process could continue for several months, while Israel is preoccupied with an election campaign, with potentially dire consequences for Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Political observers anticipate that Israel will go to the polls next spring, rather than late in 2000 as scheduled. The day being discussed last night was April 27th - one week before the May 4th date on which Mr Yasser Arafat has spoken of unilaterally declaring independent Palestinian statehood.
Mr Netanyahu has been running neck-and-neck in opinion surveys with the moderate Labour opposition leader, Mr Ehud Barak, but the race is likely to be extremely hard to call, since several other highly popular politicians are set to run for the prime minister-ship. Foremost among these is Mr Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, the former chief-of-staff of the Israeli army, who has yet to declare his candidacy formally, but who outscores both Mr Netanyahu and Mr Barak in the opinion polls.
Mr Netanyahu spoke last night of "initiating" new elections, and of his confidence that he would get "the necessary mandate from the people to achieve real peace". In truth, however, his government has fallen apart. His Finance Minister, Mr Ya'akov Ne'eman, faxed a letter of resignation yesterday from a holiday in Switzerland. His Defence Minister, Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, was apparently about to quit, in protest at Mr Netanyahu's freezing of the Wye accords. And with Monday's Knesset vote approaching, the Prime Minister knew he would be hard pressed to muster the votes to survive.
Mr Netanyahu, in the careful formulation of his speech, left the door hopefully ajar to the survival of his coalition. If the various renegade individuals and factions in his government all put aside their criticisms and decide to vote for him next Monday, he made clear, he would be pleased to carry on in office. But all the indications are that this is a forlorn hope, and that the Netanyahu government has now reached the end of the road.
Indeed, his Foreign Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, speaking immediately after the Prime Minister at what was supposed to be a celebratory gathering of Likud party members in Tel Aviv for the Hanukkah festival, was quite categorical. "We just can't carry on," Mr Sharon said. "We can't keep spending most of our time chasing after this Knesset member, that Minister . . . We have decided to bring forward the elections . . . It won't be an easy campaign. But there's no escape from it."
Mr Netanyahu clearly intends to try to place himself at the Israeli political centre in this campaign, which will revolve almost solely around the issue of peacemaking with the Palestinians. He noted last night that he hadn't torn up the Oslo accords, as the extreme right had demanded, but nor had he blithely handed over occupied territory, as the left would have wished, without demanding Palestinian concessions in return.
The challenge for Mr Barak and his Labour party will be to undermine that Netanyahu claim to the centre ground. Mr Barak will seek to prove that Mr Netanyahu never embraced the peace process, never seriously sought a partnership with Mr Arafat.
To that end, he will doubtless highlight how, over the 30 months since Mr Netanyahu narrowly won election, Israel's relationship with the Palestinians has deteriorated into crisis, how as a consequence Israel's ties with moderate Arab states, such as Jordan and Egypt, have also become increasingly strained, and how even the critical Israeli-American relationship has been damaged by Mr Netanyahu's reluctance to advance the peace effort.
Labour's task will be complicated by the likely emergence of a new centrist party featuring Mr Shahak, and by the subtle but steady shift to the right of the Israeli electorate in recent years. Mr Netanyahu's prospects will be weakened by the widespread perception of him as being unprincipled and deceitful.
He is not even entirely assured of being his Likud party's prime ministerial candidate next time; even his new, closest ally, Mr Sharon, might run against him. And factions further to the right, championing West Bank Jewish settlement growth and furious with Mr Netanyahu for signing the Wye deal, are also talking of running their own prime ministerial candidate.