While Israel was talking peace with Syria in West Virginia earlier in the week, at home its national water company was quietly drilling new wells to access underground aquifers in the Golan Heights, pumping out millions of cubic metres of water that would otherwise have flowed into Syria.
This revelation is likely to make the already tough negotiations about the heights even trickier for Syria, at a moment when Israeli opposition to any withdrawal from Syrian territory is growing.
The allocation of water rights is one of the most sensitive issues being addressed in the Israeli-Syrian peace talks, which adjourned on Monday and are scheduled to resume next week.
Disputes over precious water sources have contributed hugely to the decades of hostility between the two countries.
Despite such sensitivities, Israeli officials acknowledged for the first time yesterday, the national water company, Mekorot, has recently drilled new wells into underground aquifers in the Golan Heights - territory captured by Israel from Syria in 1967, and which Syria now seeks to regain as part of a peace treaty.
What's more, the local Golan water authority is planning to drill further wells in the next few weeks, having hired a Romanian company to expedite the work. The authority's Jonathan Amon said yesterday that this new drilling work alone would see another two to three million cubic metres of water pumped out each year for use by Israel.
This new revelation is likely to further strain the atmosphere in negotiations between the two countries - an atmosphere already so charged that at no point during the West Virginia talks did the Israelis and Syrians engage in face-to-face discussions without their American hosts present. Even the few photographs released by the White House from the talks underlined the absence of warmth.
In no picture is a Syrian delegate seen sitting next to an Israeli representative. Even at a supposedly informal session, presided over by a casually dressed President Clinton, with Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, in open-necked shirt, the Syrian Foreign Minister, Mr Farouq a Shara, is seen in formal jacket and tie.
Asked on his return from the United States last night whether he could point to any signs of nascent Syrian friendship, Mr Barak insisted that this was a marginal issue; what was important was the hoped-for peace deal itself. But opposition to the notion of trading the Golan for peace with Syria is actually growing in Israel - one recent snap poll conducted for Mr Barak showed a more than two-to-one majority against such a deal. This is partly a consequence of Israeli dismay at the absence of so much as a Syrian handshake for Mr Barak at the talks.
The Israeli Prime Minister restated last night that, when the full benefits of a deal were made clear to the electorate, he was confident they would give it their overwhelming support in a promised referendum. But he also acknowledged that a demonstration in Tel Aviv on Monday night, at which 150,000 people came out to oppose a Golan-for-peace deal, had been impressive in its scale and its restrained, respectful nature, and had drawn support even from inside his own coalition.
Indeed, two of Mr Barak's ministers, Yitzhak Levy of the National Religious Party, and Natan Sharansky of the Russian immigrant Yisrael Ba'aliya party, sat on stage at the rally, and both have indicated that they might pull their parties out of the coalition if a final peace deal involved relinquishing the entire Golan.