The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, and the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, have both confirmed that they will travel to the United States in the coming days to meet President Bill Clinton in an attempt to end five weeks of bloody clashes between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers.
While the violence has begun to show signs of ebbing since the two sides agreed to a truce late last week, the confrontations remained deadly yesterday, with two Palestinians shot dead in clashes with Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip.
Mr Arafat confirmed yesterday that he would meet Mr Clinton on Thursday, while Mr Barak is expected to be in the White House on Sunday.
While the meetings are expected to focus on ending the worst bout of violence since the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993 - over 170 people, most of them Palestinians, have died in five weeks of clashes - Mr Clinton may also try to refocus the attention of the two leaders on ways to get the diplomatic process back on track in the coming weeks.
Mr Barak apparently wants the Americans once again to present Mr Arafat with the concessions he had been prepared to make at the Camp David summit in July in an effort to reach a final status agreement, and to pin the blame for the failure of the peace process on the Palestinian leader if he again rejects them.
Speaking in front of tens of thousands of Israelis at a rally on Saturday night to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the assassination of the former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a far-right nationalist opposed to trading land for peace, Mr Barak warned the Palestinians that Israel "will not surrender to violence".
The Israeli leader also called on Mr Arafat "to end the violence and to extend your hand to a peace of the brave".
The Palestinians, for their part, have blamed Israel for not observing the conditions of a truce which was hammered out last Thursday by Mr Arafat and the former Israeli prime minister, Mr Shimon Peres, in Gaza. Mr Arafat said he wanted the US to pressure Israel into complying "with what has been agreed upon".
Talking in Gaza on Saturday, the Palestinian leader said that "Israel was supposed to immediately lift the closures on Palestinian cities, lift the siege and reopen the [Gaza] airport. I'm sorry to say that until this minute the siege has not been lifted."
In the West Bank and Gaza there were sporadic clashes yesterday between Palestinian youths and Israeli troops. Palestinians reported that a 16-yearold boy was shot in the head and killed by Israeli soldiers near the Gaza refugee camp of El Bureij, while a 28-year-old man died after being shot in the heart, also in Gaza.
Clashes also erupted yesterday in the West Bank city of Bethlehem and in Hebron, where an Israeli army jeep was fired on after it inadvertently strayed into a part of the city under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
In the West Bank village of Dura, an Israeli escaped harm after members of Mr Yasser Arafat's Force 17 bodyguard unit extracted him from a hostile crowd and handed him over to Israeli authorities.
Violent clashes also continued at the Karni and Erez checkpoint crossings from Gaza into Israel, with Palestinian youths hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers, who responded by firing tear gas and rubber bullets. There were also shooting incidents in Ramallah, Jericho, Tulkarem and Nablus. Two Jewish settlers were injured in an ambush by Palestinian gunmen north of Ramallah.
Israel's Chief of Staff, Gen Shaul Mofaz, yesterday accused the Palestinian Authority of not living up to the ceasefire understandings brokered last week. Mr Arafat, he said, was intent on using violence to achieve his aims, but at the same time had not completely abandoned the diplomatic process.
The Deputy Defence Minister, Mr Ephraim Sneh, however, said that Mr Arafat had in fact issued an order for the shooting to stop, but that it could take some time for the order to filter down to the Palestinian streets. Mr Peres expressed similar sentiments.