A 52-year-old Israeli doctor was killed and more than 50 Israelis were injured yesterday, when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up alongside a bus in the city of Kfar Sava, north of Tel Aviv and just inside the Israeli border with the West Bank.
The identity of the dead bomber was not immediately released. His victim, Dr Mario Goldin, was a local man, taking the bus to his job at a nearby hospital. A teenage Israeli boy, who was apparently standing close to the bomber, was fighting for his life last night.
Leaders of the radical Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements, while not formally taking responsibility for the blast, promised further attacks in protest at what one spokesman called "the continuation of the Israeli occupation and Zionist aggression".
Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, blamed Mr Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority for the blast - asserting that Mr Arafat had effectively green-lighted such attacks by releasing militant Islamists from jails.
Palestinian officials countered that Mr Sharon's tough military stance in confronting the seven-month Palestinian Intifada was the root cause of the bombing since, said Mr Ziyad Abu Ziyad, a Palestine Authority cabinet minister, it "pushes ordinary Palestinians into acts of extremism".
Mr Yitzhak Wald, mayor of Kfar Sava, urged the government to erect a fence on the border to stop the bombers who have now targeted his city three times this month.
However, Mr Sharon, who wishes to retain Israeli control of much of the West Bank, is disinclined to acknowledge the relevance of that border by fencing it off.
The blast culminated a weekend of heavy Israeli-Palestinian violence - which also saw an Israeli man found beaten to death in the boot of his car in Ramallah, a member of the Palestinian security services dying from wounds sustained in an earlier Israeli attack in Gaza, and the Israeli army briefly entering Palestinian-controlled territory in Gaza to demolish a Palestinian police position.
Almost 400 Palestinians and more than 70 Israelis have now been killed since the Intifada erupted late last September, and the death toll is mounting even as the two sides intensify meetings designed to find a way to quell the conflict. Israeli and Palestinians security officials held talks over the weekend, and the politicians have been talking too - notably Israel's Foreign Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, by telephone with Mr Arafat, and face-to-face with Mr Ahmed Qurei, the Speaker of the Palestinian parliament.
American and European officials are also trying to break the relentless cycle of attack and response.
But the mistrust and cynicism between the Israelis and Palestinians remains profound. Some Israeli officials are dismissing Palestinian assertions that 16 Islamic militants, responsible for firing dozens of mortar shells at Israeli targets in the past few weeks, have been arrested by the Palestinian Authority.
Those officials who do believe that arrests are taking place claim that they are a "gimmick", organised by Mr Arafat in his bid to win an invitation from President Bush.
On the Palestinian side, officials point to Mr Sharon's apparent rejection of an Egyptian-Jordanian plan for ending the violence as proof that the prime minister has no desire to enter substantive peace negotiations. While Mr Sharon, in one newspaper interview at the weekend, was asserting that he wouldn't "waste a single day" before resuming peace talks if the violence stopped, Egypt's President Mubarak was telling another newspaper there, "I have the impression that Mr Sharon is only interested in violence".