The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, raised the heat in a war of words with the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, over their land-for-security deal yesterday, just days before a sensitive visit by President Clinton.
The Israeli leader accused the Palestinian leadership of lying to its own people over the terms for the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails under the Wye River interim peace deal.
He repeated that Israel's handover of more of the West Bank to Palestinian rule would not resume until Mr Arafat admitted as much, promised not to declare a Palestinian state next May and met other terms Israel has set for the process to continue.
"Peace will take place when both sides, not just Israel, keep their peace contracts and we're not about to be patsies [suckers] on this," Mr Netanyahu said.
He said his right-wing coalition cabinet, which is deeply divided on the Wye deal, had yesterday unanimously reaffirmed a decision to halt further implementation until the Palestinians ceased what Israel regards as violations of the agreement.
"They said today one opinion - enough is enough. If the Palestinians comply, we comply. If they don't comply, we stop the process," Mr Netanyahu said.
Mr Clinton's visit from December 12th to 15th to Israel, Gaza and the West Bank was meant to celebrate the resumption of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process under the Wye deal struck in October, after 19 months of deadlock.
Instead, he will be flying in to a maelstrom of mutual recrimination between the two parties.
The prisoner issue has become the most explosive, with a surge of violent Palestinian street protests over Israel's inclusion of 150 common criminals among 250 Palestinian prisoners it released under the Wye accord last month.
Mr Netanyahu again accused the Palestinian Authority yesterday of inciting the unrest, a charge the Palestinians reject.
Israel gave a verbal pledge at the Wye Plantation summit in Maryland to release 750 prisoners in three stages but disputes Palestinian assertions that all would be security detainees. Mr Netanyahu said he had made clear at Wye that he would not free prisoners "with blood on their hands" or members of Hamas, the Islamic militant movement.
"The Palestinians come back, they know the truth and they lie to their people," he said. "It's high time that the Palestinians told their people the truth."
The US on Friday backed the way Israel has gone about freeing Palestinian prisoners under the deal and urged the parties to resolve the issue through direct talks. It also advised the parties that unilateral acts and statements would "court disaster" in peacemaking.
Mr Arafat has said repeatedly that he will declare an independent state next May on the expiry of a five-year interim period set down in the Oslo peace accords. He was less unambiguous about the date of a declaration of independence in a speech in Stockholm on Saturday which also contained conciliatory undertakings that a Palestinian state would not enter into any military alliance against Israel.
Mr Arafat, who was on a 24-hour visit to Stockholm, did not reiterate his pledge to unilaterally declare an independent state by May 4th - an issue which has heightened tensions between the two leaders.
Mr Netanyahu rejected Mr Arafat's Stockholm speech as inadequate and said the Palestinian leader had to state categorically that he would pursue only a negotiated settlement.
"What he must say is that the only way we can have an agreement is to sit and sit and sit with each other [and] negotiate until white smoke comes out," Mr Netanyahu said.
More than 2,000 Palestinian political prisoners held in jails across Israel launched a hunger strike yesterday to demand their release, the Palestinian Authority said. The Union of Palestinian Prisoners based in Gaza called on the population to demonstrate its solidarity with the hunger strikers by staging protests.