Israeli security officials fear that right-wing Jewish extremists may seek to blow up Muslim sites in Jerusalem, or to attack leading Israeli politicians, if the government sanctions a further withdrawal from occupied West Bank land.
So concerned are the police, the Shin Bet secret service and other intelligence chiefs by the prospect of violence initiated by settler extremists and others on the Israeli far right, that they recently conducted a training exercise at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City, designed to prepare responses to the threat of a Jewish attack on the Dome of the Rock or alAqsa Mosque, the holy Islamic sites atop the mount.
The growing fears of right-wing violence, detailed by intelligence chiefs on Sunday at a meeting with the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, come amid the latest hints that the government may be moving closer to carrying out a long delayed withdrawal from parts of the West Bank.
Under the original terms of the Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, Israel was due yesterday to implement the third of three "interim" withdrawals from the West Bank, before entering talks with Mr Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority on the "final status" of the West Bank, Gaza and disputed areas of Jerusalem. However, neither the first nor the second of these interim withdrawals has yet been carried out. But an Israeli tabloid yesterday published the text of a draft Israeli offer of a 13.1 per cent West Bank pull-out, reportedly conveyed by negotiators to Mr Arafat some days ago - the first written confirmation that Mr Netanyahu may now be ready to implement at least some of the accords regarding the interim withdrawals.
Aides to the prime minister are stressing that this is a draft paper, not a firm government document. What's more, although Mr Arafat said on a visit to Jordan yesterday that peace talks were making "some progress", it is not clear whether the proposal is acceptable to him.
If the peace logjam is finally about to be broken, Mr Netanyahu knows he will now have to contend not only with opposition from within his cabinet to a withdrawal, but also with a possible furious response from West Bank settlers and their supporters. Although the main security fear is of an attack on an Islamic target, there is also concern that Mr Netanyahu himself, his Defence Minister, Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, and other leaders could be in danger. Police have made several arrests among settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron in the past few days, following anti-Arab disturbances there in the wake of the fatal stabbing of a settler.
In 1995, Mr Netanyahu's predecessor, Mr Yitzhak Rabin, who was accelerating the handover of West Bank land to Mr Arafat, was assassinated by an Israeli Orthodox extremist.