Two international monitors were shot dead in the West Bank on Tuesday and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat ruled out going to an Arab summit expected to endorse a new plan for peace with Israel.
Shortly before, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said "conditions were not ripe" for lifting a travel ban imposed on Arafat in December after a spate of Palestinian suicide bombings in an 18-month-old uprising against Israeli occupation.
Arafat, who had earlier hoped to attend the Beirut summit which begins on Wednesday, announced he would stay put because Israeli preconditions for freeing him from confinement in the West Bank city of Ramallah were unacceptable.
Palestinian officials said Arafat would speak to the opening session of the two-day summit by video hookup from Ramallah.
They said Israel's insistence on the right to veto his return from the summit was the most objectionable condition. Other Israeli terms included a firm cease-fire and arrest of Palestinian militants for past attacks on Israelis.
Bloodshed in the intractable conflict added foreign monitors to its toll of almost 1,500 dead for the first time when their car came under fire on a West Bank road where Jewish settlers have been frequently targeted by Palestinian militants.
A monitor who survived the shooting and the army said a Palestinian gunman shot at the car from close range, killing two international observers -- a Swiss woman and a Turkish man -- near Hebron.
The Palestinian Authority and other officials denied that Palestinians were involved and blamed the attack on army.
But Hussein Ozar Salam, who was in the car and wounded in the attack, said he saw the gunman from the backseat.
"We saw him"
"The (car) lights were on and we saw him. He was in a Palestinian police force uniform. He was carrying a Kalashnikov and we shouted to him that we are (from the observer force) TIPH, don't shoot toward us."
"We told him that we are from TIPH and he didn't care, he kept on shooting toward us and (my) colleagues were sitting in the front seat, just dead. The driver's blood splashed on my face," Salam told Israel Radio in an interview from hospital.
The observers, an unarmed group from six European Union countries known as the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), work there to monitor tensions between its Palestinian majority and a tiny enclave of Jewish settlers.
Sharon, in an interview for Israel television's Arabic language program, said it would be easier for his cabinet to let Arafat travel abroad if the Palestinian leader addressed his people in Arabic to declare a truce and call for calm.
Sharon's thumbs-down on Arafat traveling to Beirut disregarded concerns from Israel's primary ally, the United States, that his absence could weaken a Saudi initiative for a peace settlement between Israel and the Arab world.
US officials had said it would be "constructive" for Arafat to go to the summit because it "should devote its energies to focusing on how to bring peace to the region and not discuss who is or who is not in attendance."
But aides to Arafat had said he would rather stay put than bow to "humiliating" Israeli preconditions, including arrests of militants accused of attacking Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Arafat would also have run the risk of Israel blocking his return to the Palestinian territories, part of which were handed to Palestinian rule under interim deals in the 1990s, if it judged anything he said in Beirut to be "incitement."
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had advised Arafat not to go to the summit. "We cannot predict what the Israeli government will do. If I were in his place and they told me I could go, I would not go," Mubarak told the Beirut newspaper an-Nahar.
Mubarak dealt a further blow to the Arab summit when his aides announced that he himself would not attend because of "domestic commitments."
But Arafat's absence is likely to be the focus of the Beirut meeting even though Arab leaders were still expected to endorse the Saudi plan.
After losing political ground to opposition Islamic radicals who spearheaded the Intifada (uprising) in the early going, Arafat has achieved virtual folk hero status among his people since being marooned in Ramallah by Israeli tanks.
Truce prospects dim
At least 1,103 Palestinians and 358 Israelis have been killed in violence since a Palestinian revolt against Israeli occupation began in September 2000 after peace talks stalled.
Earlier on Tuesday, Israeli police said two suicide bombings were foiled.
In one incident, Palestinians blew themselves up with their own bomb near Jerusalem on the way to an attack, while in the West Bank, a Palestinian halted for a security check threw off an explosives belt and fled after it failed to detonate.
The no-compromise stances struck by Arafat and Sharon appeared to dim immediate prospects of a truce sought by US special envoy Anthony Zinni who has shuttled between the sides.
Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said Israel had accepted compromise proposals by Zinni for bridging differences with the Palestinians over the cease-fire terms.
But the Palestinians sought clarifications from Zinni because of concerns that the bridging proposal diverged from a cease-fire plan drawn up by CIA Director George Tenet last year but never been put into effect.
Arab officials have called the initiative by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah a landmark move to end decades of conflict.
The Saudi proposal offers Israel peace and normal relations with the Arab world if it returns all land captured in the 1967 Middle East war and accepts "a just solution" for 3.6 million Palestinian refugees from five wars since 1948.
(China Daily March 27, 2002)
