Right-wing hardliners in Israel yesterday called on the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netan yahu, to cut short his summit in the US with the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, and return home. The call came immediately after a Palestinian man hurled two hand-grenades into a crowded bus station in the south of the country, injuring at least 64 people, two of them seriously.
The rush-hour attack, which took place just after 8 a.m. when the central bus station in the Negev desert town of Beersheba was crammed with commuters and soldiers returning to their bases, came at a critical juncture in the Middle East peace process as Israelis and Palestinians at the Wye Plantation in Maryland try to hammer out a deal, with strenuous US coaxing, over a belated Israeli pullback in the West Bank.
Security is a core issue in the negotiations, with Israel demanding that Mr Arafat take stronger measures against militants in the areas under his control.
Members of the far-right Moledet party and of the National Religious Party (NRP), which forms the right-wing hard core of Mr Netanyahu's ruling coalition and has threatened to bring down the government if the Prime Minister does not insist on full compliance by the Palestinians with Israeli demands, immediately called on Mr Netanyahu to board the next flight back to Israel.
"When there are injured and there is terror," declared the NRP head and Education Minister, Mr Yitzhak Levy, "you don't have negotiations."
But Mr Netanyahu, who had loudly demanded a cessation of all talks with the Palestinians following violent attacks when the assassinated prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was in power and he was in opposition, released a statement saying he would not be abandoning the negotiations prematurely.
He did announce, however, that in reaction to the attack he would be postponing a scheduled negotiation session over a subsidiary issue, the opening of a Palestinian airport in the Gaza Strip.
In the statement, Mr Netanyahu announced that the attack only underlined the need for Israel to take a firm stance in the negotiations and reiterated that he would not agree to a West Bank pullback unless Mr Arafat gave him watertight guarantees he would do more to prevent violence. "It is up to the Palestinian Authority to fight terror in both word and deed," the statement read.
Significantly, one of the more hardline members of Mr Netan yahu's ruling Likud Party, the Communications Minister, Mr Limor Livnat, did not call for the talks to be halted, saying only that "we have to stand firm when it comes to those principles that will ensure our security. We cannot accept a situation where at the same time that we are facing demands from the Palestinians and the US we are exposed to terror on a daily basis."
For his part, Mr Arafat telephoned the Israeli Prime Minister, who was in the midst of a meeting with the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, to condemn the attack and to assure Mr Netanyahu that his security forces would thoroughly investigate the matter.
According to witnesses at the scene of the grenade attack, the suspect, a young Palestinian man from the West Bank, was wrestled to the ground by passers-by and taken into custody by police.
While no one has claimed responsibility so far, Israeli security forces have been on high alert in recent weeks following threats by the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas movement which has vowed to carry out revenge strikes far more devastating than yesterday's grenade attack, for the killing of two Palestinian fugitives by Israeli soldiers last month.
While he stopped short of claiming responsibility for the attack, the Hamas leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, said it was "part of the continued resistance to the occupation of our land".
Meanwhile, several hundred Palestinian women and children, clutching pictures of family members held in Israeli jails, marched in the Gaza Strip yesterday to demand their release.
They also called for the freeing of all of the more than 3,000 Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli jails. The prisoner release is a key issue for the Palestinian negotiators at Wye Plantation.