Ten days into the Camp David peace summit, with the Israeli delegation having decided to stay on only after an eleventh-hour plea from President Clinton, the first faint signs were emerging last night that these talks might just yield some kind of agreement after all.
Firm information is still proving exceedingly hard to obtain from behind the media blackout imposed by the Americans on the talks, but Israeli and Palestinian sources were referring last night to a new series of US bridging proposals on the key issue of Jerusalem which the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, has accepted, and which the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, has not rejected.
According to the sketchy reports of these proposals, they provide for a full Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty, including a commitment from both sides that they are formally "ending the conflict" between them. Much progress has reportedly been made in the past days of the summit on issues such as Palestinian refugee rights, the fate of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, modalities for Palestinian statehood, and so on.
The new proposals are said to constitute an attempt to resolve the Jerusalem dispute as well, and reportedly provide for Israel annexing several large settlements close to the city and thus boosting its Jewish population, and the Palestinians gaining some kind of sovereign status in the city's eastern, Arab-populated neighbourhoods. As for the Old City, holy to Jews for the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, and to Muslims and Christians for the mosques atop that mount and the churches in its shadow, its status, according to reports of the new US proposals, would be deferred for resolution at a later date.
For the record, Israeli officials remain adamant that Mr Barak will not budge from his declared "red line" rejecting Palestinian sovereignty anywhere in Jerusalem. And Palestinian officials are similarly insistent that Mr Arafat will not back down from his demand for Palestinian sovereignty throughout East Jerusalem and the Old City. But privately, Israeli politicians who have been in contact with Mr Barak were last night confirming some of the details of these proposals. And some Palestinian sources were suggesting that Mr Arafat might have won room for manoeuvre in a series of telephone conversations with Arab leaders - including President Mubarak of Egypt, King Abdullah of Jordan and other Arab leaders - several of whom were reported to have told him that any deal on Jerusalem that was acceptable to him would also be acceptable to the wider Arab world.
That the two teams are still at Camp David and negotiating at all is the result of a dramatic turnaround late on Wednesday night, Washington time. The White House spokesman, Mr Joe Lockhart, actually announced that the talks had "come to a conclusion without an agreement". But as Mr Clinton prepared to leave for Okinawa, Japan, for the G8 summit at which he is spending the weekend, Mr Barak, who had been threatening all day to fly back to Israel, relented and opted to stay on. A clearly exhausted President Clinton emerged from the seclusion of Camp David to tell the media that "nobody wanted to quit. Nobody wanted to give up."
The US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, took charge of the talks yesterday. She met separately with Mr Barak and Mr Arafat and their teams, the State Department spokesman, Mr Richard Boucher, said.
"She will continue to try to close the gaps and move forward on the issues so that when the president returns he can assess the status of our efforts," he told reporters.