As if the war on the ground was not intense enough, the war of words between Israel and the Palestinian Authority escalated a notch yesterday. The Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, asserted that Israel was stepping up its military action "to make the Palestinian people kneel down".
"But they forgot that we are a courageous people. We will not capitulate. We will not surrender," he said.
Israel's Minister of Internal Security, Mr Uzi Landau, had earlier told an audience in New York that the Israeli army might soon resort to "all-out" combat. The authority was escalating "terrorist activities until, by violent means, they will be able to push us around and extract concessions".
Israel, he said, was "stepping up our activity in order to protect ourselves. But I believe eventually we will have to start and combat them all-out."
Meanwhile, Mr Uri Ariel, a spokesman for the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, said a mooted freeze on settlement activity as part of an internationally brokered ceasefire plan was unacceptable.
And Egypt's new Foreign Minister, Mr Ahmed Maher, weighed in with the assertion that Israel was trying "to dismantle the Palestinian Authority". He said it should "stop immediately such actions and start to implement confidence-building measures."
Behind all the angry rhetoric there was faint evidence of diplomatic progress, with Israel's Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, at its centre. Mr Peres seems to think he has persuaded his Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, to accept a kind of semi-settlement freeze, under which Israel would agree not to confiscate any further West Bank land for building Jewish homes. "We have no territorial appetite outside the settlements," he said yesterday.
However, the US-led Mitchell Commission team, architect of the ceasefire proposal, has called for a freeze on all building even inside existing settlement boundaries. This means Mr Peres is now working to convince the US and other parties of the merits of his compromise - a compromise which the Palestinians are unlikely to accept.
If he is successful, he may find that he brings down his own coalition. Mr Sharon may be reluctantly on board - although he has not said as much publicly - but other coalition right-wingers most certainly are not. "I can't see our party staying in a government which freezes settlement," said hardliner Mr Benny Elon yesterday. "Mind you, I can't see Sharon agreeing to that."
Throughout the day, meanwhile, shootings and bombings continued. An Israeli man was found beaten to death north of Jerusalem last night, and a 64year-old Palestinian man was one of four injured in a predawn gun battle in Gaza. Israeli tanks also entered Gaza's Rafah refugee camp and helicopters blew up what the army said was a weapons factory in Jenin; the Palestinians denied the claim.