While the man at the centre of the renewed storm confined himself to a brief "no comment", Israeli officials went on a concerted anti-BBC offensive yesterday, a day after the British broadcaster aired a Panorama documentary in which international legal experts suggested that the Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, could be indicted for war crimes.
Meanwhile, lawyers for 28 survivors of the crime in question, the 1982 massacres by Christian Phalangist fighters of hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, began legal action against Mr Sharon in the Belgian courts.
One of the 28, Ms Souad Srour al-Mere'eh, who still lives in Shatilla, said she hoped Mr Sharon would be "tried and hanged for what he did". Leaving the camp for Brussels, she said she had been raped by the Phalangist fighters and left handicapped with a bullet in her spine, while most of her family had been killed.
An Israeli commission of inquiry in 1983 found that Mr Sharon bore indirect personal responsibility for the massacres since, as minister of defence, he should have foreseen that the pro-Israeli Phalangist militiamen he let into the camps would seek to avenge the assassination of Lebanon's Christian President-elect, Bashar Jemayal. In the wake of the commission's report, Mr Sharon was forced to step down as defence minister; he completed his political comeback last February, winning election as Prime Minister.
There was no consensus among international legal experts yesterday as to whether the proceedings in Belgian, or other efforts, would lead to meaningful legal action against Mr Sharon. Some experts indicated that the courts would be unlikely or unable to press charges over events that took place 19 years ago, but others noted that the Belgian courts sentenced four Rwandans to jail terms this month for their roles in the 1994 genocide.
On Panorama Dr Richard Falk, a Princeton professor who was vice chairman of an international commission that investigated Israel's invasion of Lebanon, argued that Mr Sharon would be indictable. A South African judge, Mr Richard Goldstone, on the same programme, indicated that Mr Sharon could be considered "more responsible" than the militiamen.
Mr Dov Weisglas, Mr Sharon's lawyer, dismissed the programme as "one-sided" and lacking in legal value. Other Israeli officials employed richer language, some suggesting that the BBC was showing itself to be anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli, with the Justice Minister, Mr Meir Sheetrit, saying that Mr Sharon had been maliciously targeted.
The BBC's deputy head of news, Mr Mark Damazer, noted that the programme made clear that Mr Sharon had not been in the camps "wielding guns and knives and killing people". It had not branded Mr Sharon a war criminal, he noted.
Meanwhile a 35-year-old Israeli settler was shot dead by Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank yesterday, and a second Israeli was killed last night in a separate shooting, as the fragile ceasefire faced its biggest test. Late on Sunday, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead by Israeli troops at the Khan Younis refugee camp.