THE MIDDLE EAST: Israeli military officials have described their activity in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an intensification of their "fight against Palestinian terrorism".
Palestinian officials said the actions represented the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon's "policy of destruction". At the end of the bloodiest single day in 17 months of horrifying violence, at least 35 Palestinians - many of them armed gunmen, but many civilians too - and an Israeli soldier were dead. "It's a killing field out there," said Mr Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian cabinet minister.
Fighter planes, gunboats and ground forces attacked Palestinian police stations and bases in the Gaza Strip. In the southern Gaza village of Khouza, termed "a centre of terrorist activity" by the army, 16 Palestinians - 14 of them armed - were killed, including Maj Gen Ahmed Mefrej, Mr Arafat's commander in southern Gaza, the most senior Palestinian officer to die in the Intifada.
The army also took control of parts of the West Bank city of Bethlehem - where seven Palestinians, among them a local hospital director, hit by a shell on his way to work, were killed in the early morning. After that, much of the city was eerily quiet - with occasional tanks rumbling in the distance, and tyres burning in the streets.
Some of the heaviest fighting occurred in Tulkarm refugee camp, which had been surrounded by Israeli forces since Thursday night. Fourteen Palestinians, including a nine-year-old boy, were killed. (An 11-year-old Palestinian boy was killed in Jenin, to the north). At Tulkarm and elsewhere in the West Bank, Palestinian medical teams said they were prevented by the army from reaching some of the wounded. Four medical personnel have been killed by Israeli fire in the past few days, prompting stinging criticism from the United Nations; Israel claims that Palestinian ambulances are used to smuggle wanted Palestinians out of battle-zones and to transport weaponry.
Israel said it had captured dozens of Palestinian gunmen inside the Tulkarm camp, and Israel Television last night showed footage of several arrested men, seated in a line facing a wall, alongside a pile of captured machine-guns. The army said it had also discovered a large explosives factory in the camp.
And in northern Jerusalem, Israeli police foiled another suicide bombing, shooting dead a Palestinian man as he tried to detonate an explosive device he was carrying.
Yesterday's death toll underlined this week's change of tactics by Mr Sharon, who told journalists on Monday that the time had come to put aside all thought of resumed peace talks, and to concentrate on winning the "war against terror". Before they would show flexibility at the negotiating table, the Palestinians had to be taught they would gain nothing by attacking Israeli targets, he said. Israel had to "increase their losses" until they begged for a ceasefire. Yet by last night, Mr Sharon appeared to have changed tactics once again, offering to begin immediate talks on a ceasefire.
With much of the Israeli public sharing his contention that Mr Yasser Arafat has been deliberately fuelling the conflict, and that the bloodshed would long since have halted were the Palestinian leader to have given genuine orders for his gunmen to hold back, Mr Sharon had allowed his forces to come within a few yards of killing Mr Arafat - along with the well-meaning EU envoy, Mr Miguel Moratinos - in a missile attack on Wednesday.
But the deliberate escalation clearly hasn't worked to Mr Sharon's advantage.
The US is fuming. Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, said bitterly on Wednesday that trying to "solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed" was not going to lead anywhere. President Bush added a day later that the Prime Minister had to know that he "can't achieve peace by causing violence to escalate".
The Israeli public is angry too. Fifty-six per cent of Israelis are unhappy with Mr Sharon's personal performance, according to a poll in the top-selling Yediot Ahronot yesterday. Seventy-six per cent say his government is failing to provide security.
And most importantly, as far as Mr Sharon and his stated objectives are concerned, the new military onslaught, and the consequent soaring Palestinian death toll, have done nothing to prevent Israelis being killed.
Mr Sharon's notion that restricting Mr Arafat to Ramallah would render him "irrelevant", and see him replaced by more convenient Palestinian leaders, has also proved misguided. Mr Arafat is more popular than in years - his bunker-mentality defiance championed by the most moderate and the most extreme Palestinians. And the gunmen of the Tanzim and al-Aqsa Brigades of Fatah, tacitly permitted by Mr Arafat to unleash their fire, are eclipsing Hamas and Islamic Jihad in killing Israeli soldiers, settlers, and civilians inside sovereign Israel too.
The army has proved strikingly effective in tracking down and killing individual intifada orchestrators. But it has frequently been outsmarted in the refugee camps, where the groups of "wanted men" it has sought have slipped away before the troops arrived. And the morale of the gunmen has been boosted by such "successes" as last Sunday's killing at a West Bank roadblock of 10 Israelis.
Lately, the fighting has resembled the confrontations between the army and Hizbullah guerrillas in southern Lebanon - with the far stronger Israeli force, now as then,proving vulnerable to gunmen more familiar with the territory and more defiantly absorbing losses. In May 2000, as the Palestinians know full well, the Israeli army withdrew unilaterally from its south Lebanon "security zone" to the international border. A major difference here, however, is that many Israelis strongly resist the idea of Israel withdrawing from the occupied West Bank where 200,000 Jews have made their homes. And other Israelis argue that to "capitulate" in the West Bank would be to encourage continued Palestinian aggression.
So while the Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, is pleading with Mr Sharon to restore some kind of "political incentive" for Mr Arafat, most members of the Israeli government have actually been calling for a greater use of force. The challenge facing Mr Bush's peace envoy, Gen Anthony Zinni, when he arrives here this week, is somehow to persuade both sides that the killing has to stop, and drag them back to the peace table. It's an unenviable task. But a critical one.