Two Israelis were dragged out of a restaurant by masked Palestinians in the centre of the West Bank town of Tulkarm yesterday afternoon, shot dead and left by the side of the road, north of the town, according to reports carried by the Israeli media last night.
The murders led to the immediate suspension of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
The two dead men, Jewish restaurant-owners according to the initial reports, had apparently gone shopping in Tulkarm together with a third man, an Israeli Arab.
All three were pulled out of the Abu Nidal Restaurant at which they had stopped to eat.
However, the Israeli Arab was set free and he was giving his account of the events to Israeli investigators last night.
News of the deaths followed last week's murder of an Israeli teenager who had apparently been lured to Ramallah, also in the West Bank, via an Internet contact.
It prompted officials to remind Israelis that they were taking their lives in their hands if they entered Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank, where the rule of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) seems to be becoming ever weaker.
The atmosphere in Tulkarm, in particular, has been tense since last month's killing by Israel of a leading Fatah official, Mr Thabet Thabet.
His death was one of a series of such assassinations by Israel, which has prompted Palestinian vows of revenge, as well as two executions by the PA and the arrests of numerous Palestinians alleged to have helped Israel to identify its targets.
Yesterday's killings prompted an immediate suspension of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at Taba in Egypt, with Israeli ministers recalled to Jerusalem, and may well lead to a hardening of Israeli public opinion ahead of prime ministerial elections on February 6th.
After two days of cautious optimism at Taba, the talks had already run into the more predictable deadlock yesterday, with early suggestions that the sides might be ready to draft at least some relatively non-controversial clauses of a framework peace agreement coming to nothing.
Similarly, an initial sense that the parties were edging towards a new compromise over Jerusalem dissipated within hours, when Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, stated that while he favoured what he called "joint management" in the Old City, that did not mean he would share sovereignty with the Palestinians at "Jewish holy places".
Mr Barak is fighting what looks like a losing battle to stay in power. Opinion polls published yesterday, before the West Bank murders, showed him still 16-20 per cent behind the hardline Likud challenger, Mr Ariel Sharon.
The only mild encouragement for the Prime Minister yesterday was his victory in a series of high-school polls - among Israeli children, who to his sorrow, are too young to vote.