President Clinton has given Israeli and Palestinian leaders a deadline of next Tuesday to reach an "all-or-nothing" peace accord, a senior Palestinian official said yesterday.
Mr Clinton bluntly told the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, during some six hours of three-way talks on Thursday that the peace process had been deadlocked for far too long, the official said, on condition of anonymity.
"Clinton told the two men that they had until Tuesday to come up with an agreement and that it was an all-or-nothing proposition," he said. "I have waited for 17 months. I know you both have internal difficulties but I have international concerns," the official quoted Mr Clinton as saying.
"There can be no more delays and no half-solutions. If we don't reach agreement I am ready to go out on Tuesday and say it was a failure," the President reportedly added. "The United States will continue trying to help in the Mideast but we cannot pursue this kind of intensive intervention."
There was no immediate confirmation of Mr Clinton's remarks from the Israelis or US officials, who have tried to impose a news blackout on the negotiations being held at the remote Wye River conference centre in rural Maryland, about 110 km east of Washington.
But that Mr Clinton has decided to turn up the pressure was made abundantly clear by the Americans themselves as they cloistered the Palestinian and Israeli negotiators together in neighbouring residences at Wye River under the active prodding of the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright.
Mr Clinton launched the summit on Thursday, with negotiations focused on a US proposal linking an Israeli withdrawal from 13 per cent more of the West Bank - bringing Palestinian full or partial rule to 40 per cent of the territory - in exchange for specific Palestinian steps to halt anti-Israeli violence.
The two sides have reached broad agreement on the scope of the Israeli pullback, but deep differences appear to remain on the security matters and a series of other issues, including Jewish settlement-building and future Israeli land transfers to self-rule.
Palestinian officials said extensive discussions late on Thursday on the security arrangements involved heated exchanges and produced no results.
The US plan is for the two sides to wrap up the so-called interim issues and launch immediately into far tougher negotiations on the core elements of the Middle East conflict - Palestinians' demand for a state with part of Jerusalem as its capital and with a right of return home for Palestinian refugees.
The Wye River meetings were originally expected to last only until tomorrow, but Mr Netanyahu and Mr Arafat have not ruled out extending their stay.
Mr Clinton left Washington yesterday for a previously scheduled campaign tour, leaving Ms Albright in charge of the negotiations.
But he reportedly could return to the conference site today for informal discussions.
Meanwhile, talks continued between Mr Netanyahu and Mr Arafat and in a series of committees handling specific "interim" peace issues, such as the release of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, the opening of a Palestinian airport and a joint industrial zone, officials said.