Israeli soldiers killed two Palestinians in gun battles in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron today, providing a violent backdrop for efforts to arrange talks on ending more than 11 months of bloodshed.
Israeli Foreign Minister Mr Shimon Peres warned against unrealistic expectations that a meeting being arranged with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat would end the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.
With diplomatic efforts intensifying, European Union foreign policy chief Mr Javier Solana was to arrive in the region late today to help lay the groundwork for a Peres-Arafat meeting, possibly to be held in Italy at the end of the week.
"We don't want to exaggerate or heighten expectations, on the other hand we don't want to produce another disappointment so we are preparing it as carefully as possible," Mr Peres told reporters during a visit to a Tel Aviv school.
"We are looking for the right time and the right venue," Mr Peres said.
Previous rounds of talks between Mr Peres and Mr Arafat have done little to curb the violence that began last September after peace Middle East negotiations stalled.
Witnesses said that during the clashes in Hebron, an Israeli tank briefly entered a Palestinian-ruled area of the city, divided into Israeli and Palestinian zones under a 1997 agreement.
Some 400 militant Jews live in Hebron among 120,000 Palestinian residents.
The army said a soldier and an eight-year-old Israeli boy were wounded in fighting yesterday which disrupted the first day of the Palestinian school year by preventing dozens of students from attending classes.
In the Gaza Strip yesterday, an armored Israeli bulldozer briefly entered a Palestinian-ruled area and destroyed a house near the Khan Younis refugee camp from where the Israeli army said Palestinian gunmen had shot a soldier.
Mr Peres lashed out at a United Nations racism conference in Durban, South Africa after thousands of non-governmental organizations branded Israel a "racist and apartheid" state in the early hours of today.
He called the resolution "an outburst of hate and anti-Semitism" and said the Durban conference had so far demonstrated "neither understanding, nor tolerance, nor a message for the future."
At the UN conference yesterday, Mr Arafat repeated charges he made a day earlier accusing Israel of "ethnic cleansing" in confronting Palestinian uprising.
On the sidelines of the conference, the German and Italian foreign ministers held talks with Mr Arafat to discuss a possible meeting with Mr Peres.