Palestinian leaders say they plan to give Israel a dose of its own medicine in the form of economic sanctions. Mr Yasser Arafat's self-rule government said yesterday it intended initiating a gradual boycott of Israeli products in the areas under its control to counter punitive economic steps taken by Israel after the Jerusalem twin suicide bombing on July 30th.
"We want the Israeli producers also to feel the effects of the economic closure imposed on us," said Mr Khaled Salaam, a senior economic adviser to Mr Arafat.
According to Palestinian officials, who estimated goods imported daily from Israel into the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be worth around $9 million (£6 million), the boycott of Israeli products could include cigarettes, soft drinks and chocolates. The Palestinians, however, depend on Israel for basic commodities such as fuel, flour and cement.
Mr Arafat, who has resisted Israeli demands for wholesale arrests of Islamic militants, told a gathering in the West Bank city of Nablus on Saturday that if Israel persisted with its economic sanctions then the Intifada - the Palestinian uprising which started in 1987 - could well be reignited. Despite the growing tension the Israeli prime minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, despatched his personal envoy, Mr Yitzhak Molcho, to Gaza on Saturday night. His mission was to thank Mr Arafat for Palestinian security co-operation in the speedy capture of the three killers of a Jerusalem taxi driver, Mr Shmuel Ben-Baruch. Mr Ben-Baruch went missing late on Thursday night. His body was found in a cistern in the Palestinian-controlled city of Jericho early on Saturday morning.
Mr Ben-Baruch's murderers faced a lightning-quick trial on Saturday, with two of them being sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour and the third, a minor, getting 15 years. Such swift trials are not uncommon, and are said to be aimed at blocking any Israeli request for extradition - under a provision of the Oslo peace accords.
But Israeli officials - some of whom suggested the murder might have been as much an act of terror as a criminal act - insisted that the Palestinian co-operation was no substitute for an all-out assault on terror.
The incident, said a spokesman in the prime minister's office, proved that "when the Palestinian Authority wanted to, it could act effectively . . . but when it comes to wiping out the terror infrastructure, the Authority prefers not to do anything."
AFP adds: Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs and an official of the US Central Intelligence Agency were to meet in Ramallah last night under a formula drawn up by US envoy Mr Dennis Ross to improve Palestinian action against anti-Israeli radicals.
Peter Hirschberg is a senior writer at the Jerusalem Report