Middle East: Two Israeli soldiers were killed by a Palestinian gunman yesterday at a checkpoint on the main road from Bethlehem to Jerusalem.
The killings prompted the Israeli army to reimpose some recently eased restrictions on local Palestinians but apparently not derailing fragile efforts to negotiate a truce in the three-year conflict.
One of the men killed, Sgt-Maj Shlomo Belsky (23), was speaking to his mother, Galina, on a mobile phone when the shooting started. The gunman, who is still on the loose, had approached to within a few yards of the checkpoint, on the Tunnel Road just south of Jerusalem, with an AK-47 assault rifle concealed in a Muslim prayer mat.
He fatally wounded Sgt-Maj Belsky, who died on the way to hospital, and shot dead a second soldier, Sgt Shaul Lahav (20).
The two Israelis were the first to be killed since October 24th, when three soldiers guarding a settlement in Gaza were shot dead. Twenty-five Palestinians have been killed in the same period - some of them gunmen, many of them civilians, eight of them minors.
There were also reports last night that a Palestinian, injured earlier in the day during an Israeli army raid at Rafah, in southern Gaza, had died of his wounds.
The Israeli army said the incursion was intended to uncover tunnels through which weapons were being smuggled into Gaza under the adjacent border with Egypt and that once such tunnel had been found. Nine Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were injured in gun-battles there.
Israel's Justice Minister, Mr Yosef Lapid, said the shooting at the checkpoint raised doubts about the commitment of the new Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Mr Ahmed Korei, to ending such attacks. Nevertheless, tentative plans are still being made for a meeting next week between Mr Korei and Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, while Mr Korei is still trying to obtain ceasefire pledges from Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups.
Both Mr Korei and Egyptian mediators are today to hold talks with various Palestinian factions in Gaza. Israel is denying that it has offered to suspend all military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip if Mr Korei orders the PA's security forces to work concertedly to thwart further attacks, while Israeli officials rejected an Israeli newspaper claim that they had already halted so- called "targeted strikes" on alleged Intifada kingpins.
However, officials on both sides are expressing a rare, if cautious, optimism.
In more dramatically optimistic terms, meanwhile, Israel's Finance Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, has proclaimed the end of the three-year Intifada-fuelled economic recession, which has seen 300,000 Israelis out of work, education and social services reeling from crippling cutbacks, the tourism industry devastated and intermittent strike action by various trades unions.
Hailing an unexpected 2.7 per cent rise in gross domestic product for the third quarter of 2003, Mr Netanyahu, who hopes success at the Treasury will pave the way to his return as prime minister, yesterday said: "We are out of the recession. The Israeli economy, which was on the edge of the abyss, is on the way up."