The US is launching a new diplomatic offensive to save the Israeli-Palestinian "ceasefire" - a term further devalued yesterday by the killings of yet another Palestinian and another Israeli.
President Bush last night telephoned both the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, and the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, to tell them that his Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, was being dispatched immediately to the region. While "immediately" seems likely, in practice, to mean next week, another US envoy, Mr William Burns, is already on his way.
The renewed US intervention, authorised just a week after CIA Director Mr George Tenet left the region with his purported ceasefire agreement, is a consequence of the abject failure of both sides to find either the will or the way to end almost nine months of Intifada violence. Yesterday's two killings all too grimly illustrated the problem.
A Palestinian gunman shot dead an Israeli settler who had stopped his car in a Palestinian village barely 50 yards from the entrance to his Nablus-area settlement. The victim was the third Israeli to die in that area in the past three days, and his killing infuriated dozens of settlers who were already holding a protest outside Mr Sharon's office in Jerusalem. Other settlers were reported to have set fire to Palestinian olive groves.
"We are willing to defend this territory with our lives," said Mr Benny Kasriel, mayor of the largest West Bank settlement, Ma'aleh Adumin. "But we are not willing to pay with our lives for this government's policy of restraint, to score public opinion points for Israel in the United States and Europe."
Earlier in the day, Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian outside Ramallah - one of three men, Israeli military officials said, who approached an army roadblock and ignored shouted calls from soldiers to stop. "They [the Israelis] are still firing from their tanks and machine-guns," said Mr Arafat, "and are still using internationally-banned weapons, and the settlers are pursuing their crimes under the protection of the Israeli army. Their claim that they are committed to a ceasefire is a lie."
Against this backdrop of continuing violence, Israeli and Palestinian security officials are continuing to meet. They held talks again yesterday in Jerusalem but spent much of their time trading accusations.
When the Palestinians charge that Israel is failing to end its military blockades of several West Bank cities, and refusing to begin the six-week "cooling-off" countdown that, under the Tenet accord, would be followed by a freeze in building at settlements, the Israelis respond with their own references to the Tenet agreement: that, first, violence and anti-Israeli incitement on Palestinian TV has to stop, and the Palestinian Authority must arrest alleged bomb-makers.
For American intervention to be effective, it will have to halt a spiral of violence that now sees Mr Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO openly threatening, in pamphlets issued yesterday, to deprive settlers and the army of "even a moment of peace", while even relative settler moderates like Mr Kasriel now intimate sympathy for extremists who threaten to "take the law into their own hands".
To complete the gloomy picture, arch-terrorist Osama binLaden has released footage of his trainees at camps in Afghanistan preparing, as he says in his filmed speech, to join the conflict. "Your brothers in Palestine," he tells his recruits in the film, "are waiting for you with bated breath."