Incensed by a Palestinian national unity conference initiated by Mr Yasser Arafat, which includes members of Islamic militant groups like Hamas, Israeli leaders yesterday said the Palestinian leader had to stop courting terror groups and begin destroying them.
The unity dialogue moved from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank town of Ramallah yesterday. The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, told a cabinet meeting that Israel, which has demanded the Palestinian Authority clamp down on Islamic militants in the wake of the July 30th Jerusalem suicide bombings, could not afford to "bury its head in the sand" and ignore what he said were nothing more than minor attempts by Mr Arafat to curb the militant groups with whom he was meeting.
"As long as we see that the Palestinian Authority leadership is getting along with those [terror] organisations and trying to make peace and national unity with them," said the Cabinet Secretary, Mr Danny Naveh, "it creates a very, very big question mark about the future of the peace process."
At the conference, orchestrated by Mr Arafat in an attempt to forge a united Palestinian front in the face of economic sanctions imposed by Israel, members of Fatah, the main PLO faction, yesterday warned that if Israel did not help Mr Arafat to implement the peace accords, then they would turn to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who are virulently opposed to dialogue with Israel.
In Lebanon, the death toll in the latest wave of hostilities continued to rise yesterday when a Lebanese truck driver was killed by a roadside bomb near the town of Jezzine, just outside the northernmost tip of Israel's self-imposed security zone in south Lebanon. Members of Israel's proxy South Lebanon Army (SLA) militia, who largely control Jezzine, blamed the Iranian-backed Shia Hizbullah movement for the attack.
Tension began to escalate on Monday when a Hizbullah roadside bomb killed two children of an SLA commander, who himself was killed in a Hizbullah attack four years ago. SLA soldiers retaliated by shelling the port city of Sidon, killing eight civilians. In the first interview since his troops shelled Sidon, an unrepentant Gen Antoine Lahad, commander of the 2,500-strong SLA militia which is trained and armed by Israel, yesterday told the daily Yediot Aharonot that Israel should not have been surprised by the assault.
"What did they expect in Israel?" he said. "That we will sit with our arms folded while the Hizbullah is killing our children. I am sorry that the shelling of Sidon led to the firing of katyushas on Israel, but this time we could not restrain ourselves."
Peter Hirschberg is a senior writer at the Jerusalem Report; Editorial comment page 15.