THE United States expects a meeting between the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, will be held quite soon", the US State Department said early this morning.
The State Department spokesman, Mr Nicholas Burns, said prospects for a meeting to ease tensions after three days of Palestinian Israeli clashes on the West Bank and elsewhere had improved after intensive telephone diplomacy from New York by the US Secretary of State, Mr Warren Christopher.
"We are very hopeful that a meeting will be held quite soon", Mr Burns told reporters. But he said the two leaders themselves would announce the exact time and place. "We believe that both leaders understand the importance of a meeting and of that being a productive meeting."
He said such a meeting could not settle all issues, but it could begin a process of resolving them. It could define an agenda for further talks, make some progress on basic issues and send a "forceful signal" that the two sides needed to draw back from violence.
In another day of fighting and bloodshed yesterday, three Palestinians were killed on Jerusalem's Temple Mount and there were clashes in many parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The violence has so far resulted in the deaths of more than 50 Palestinians and 14 Israelis.
There has been much talk during the crisis of a three way summit including President Mubarak of Egypt.
At the Jerusalem news conference at which he said he was prepared to meet the Palestinian leader, the Israeli prime minister accused Mr Arafat of deliberately and personally inciting Palestinian policemen into turning their guns on Israeli soldiers behaviour Mr Netanyahu described as being "utterly at odds with all concepts of peace". He declared: "There will be no political dividends through violence."
Mr Arafat, for his part, was apparently unwilling to meet Mr Netanyahu unless the prime minister had concrete proposals for advancing peace efforts and unless he first closed a new entrance to an ancient underground tunnel in Jerusalem's Old City - the spark which ignited this week's fighting. Although the tunnel was temporarily closed yesterday for what were described as "security reasons", Mr Netanyahu is determined not to re seal it permanently, since this would be seen as capitulation.
Mr Arafat was clearly working to calm the tempers of his 30,000 armed policemen yesterday, sending his most senior officers out into the field to command them. And, although there was a stream of confrontations all day, and frequent gun battles, the violence was not as intense as it had been on Thursday.
As had been feared, the main trouble spot was the Temple Mount, where Muslims gathered for Friday prayers. Tight security and fears of violence kept all but a few thousand worshippers from gathering at the al Aqsa mosque. But, almost inevitably, there was a clash at noon between stone throwing Palestinians and Israeli troops firing rubber bullets; three Palestinians were killed and many more were injured.
Fighting flared in Rafiah, at the southern foot of the Gaza Strip, with gunfire also coming from across the border in Egypt, where an Egyptian soldier had been killed by Israeli gunfire on Thursday. Yesterday, an Israeli colonel was killed by gunfire from Egypt and at least two other Israelis were injured.
There were clashes in almost every major West Bank city, with four Palestinians and two Israelis killed. The Israeli army has deployed tanks on the outskirts of some Palestinian controlled West Bank cities, including Ramallah and Jericho, and at the tip of the Gaza Strip, in a demonstrative show of force; army officials said that, if fighting intensified in the coming days, Israel would not hesitate to send its forces into Palestinian areas.
At his news conference, Mr Netanyahu refused to accept that his decision to open the tunnel entrance had caused the violence, and his security chiefs, sitting by his side, backed up his assertion that Mr Arafat was manipulating the conflict in an attempt to win political concessions. Military sources last night claimed that members of Mr Arafat's own elite Force 17 unit had been involved in the exchanges of gunfire in Gaza on Thursday.
Ms Hanan Ashrawi, a leading Palestinian minister, said Mr Netanyahu was being "dangerous and cynical" in blaming the Palestinian side and was "trying to rationalise his errors by wilfully misleading" his people. Israel's credibility "as a sovereign state willing to honour its own agreements" was now in doubt.
(David Horovitz is managing editor of the Jerusalem Report)