Israelis kill four militants crossing from Jordan

JERUSALEM -- U.S.-led truce talks ended without an agreement late Sunday but both Israelis and Palestinians said they would meet again, focusing on new American proposals aimed at bridging their differences and halting 18 months of bloodshed.

Violence raged despite the cease-fire efforts. Israeli commandos backed by helicopters tracked and killed four militants who slipped across the normally quiet border from Jordan, and seven other people were killed in other violence.

U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni convened Israeli and Palestinian security commanders in an undisclosed location to try to settle the final differences over implementing a truce plan negotiated last year by CIA director George Tenet.

Israeli and Palestinian officials, requesting anonymity, said Zinni presented proposals to bridge the gaps between the two sides, and the two sides were to present their responses at another meeting of security commanders on Monday.

No details of the U.S. proposals were made public. But an Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said those proposals were constructive.

'Not there yet'

A U.S. official said Sunday's meeting was "slow going. It's fair to point a finger of blame at the Palestinians."

"We are not there yet," the U.S official said of Yasser Arafat accepting truce terms which President Bush and Vice President Cheney set as a precondition for Cheney to meet Arafat in Egypt.

After nightfall Sunday, an Israeli was killed in a drive-by shooting near Hebron in the southern part of the West Bank.

Palestinian militants fatally shot an Israeli woman riding a bus in the West Bank near the Palestinian city of Ramallah on Sunday morning, and Israeli troops pursuing the attackers killed a Palestinian policeman in a gunbattle at a checkpoint nearby.

In the Gaza Strip, Israeli troops shot and killed three Palestinians near a Jewish settlement. The army said soldiers spotted the men crawling up to a fence surrounding a group of settlements in southern Gaza and planting a bomb.

Sunday's late night meeting was Zinni's latest attempt to reach a cease-fire before an important Arab summit that starts Wednesday. Zinni convened Israeli and Palestinian security commanders in an undisclosed location about 10:30 p.m. to try to settle the final differences over a truce declaration.

He faces pressure to reach a deal before the summit in Beirut, Lebanon, which will focus heavily on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Arafat would be one of the central figures at the summit, but Israel has not given him permission to go -- and Prime Minster Ariel Sharon suggested Sunday that Israel would keep the Palestinian leader grounded if there is no there is no truce and violence persists.

"In my view, so long as the terrorism continues, (Arafat) will not get out of here," Sharon told his Cabinet, according to an Israeli official present at the meeting.

Sharon also told his cabinet that he would like to attend the Arab League summit himself to explain the Israeli position on the Mideast conflict.

"I think it would be appropriate that I be permitted to appear before the conference," he said. "Because in the last analysis, no plan can be carried out without Israel."

However, Sharon is widely despised throughout the Arab world, and it was highly unlikely he would be invited. Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa and a Lebanese government minister scoffed at Sharon's request.

The Palestinians said barring Arafat from the summit would escalate tensions.

"Israel wants to dictate its conditions to us, but they should know very well that this blackmail will not have any effect on our political decisions," Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said.

In the incident at the frontier, Jordan's army said several men armed with automatic rifles opened fire on a Jordanian border patrol overnight and then escaped across the shallow Yarmouk River, which separates Jordan from Israel.

An elite Israeli commando unit, alerted by a breach in the electronic border fence, took up pursuit in the thick underbrush on the Israeli side. Security forces cleared out hundreds of hikers who were walking along trails in the wooded, hilly area in northern Israel.

The troops followed boot tracks, and commandos, snipers and helicopters all opened fire when they found the four men, dressed in military uniforms, about two miles from the border, the army said. It said the men, who were not identified, were carrying explosives.

Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994 and the border has remained mostly quiet, with security forces from both countries working to prevent attacks. However, in rare cases, militant Palestinians have entered Israel from Jordan, where more than half the population is of Palestinian origin and many oppose the peace deal with Israel.

Zinni, who arrived 11 days ago, has been talking with both sides about a U.S. truce plan worked out last year by CIA director George Tenet. The Israelis and Palestinians have endorsed the U.S. cease-fire plan in principle but remain in dispute on several key issues.

Israel, backed by the United States, has repeatedly called on Arafat to clamp down on militants. The Palestinians say Israel must pull back its troops to the positions they held at the outbreak of the fighting in September 2000.

The outcome of the truce talks could determine whether Cheney goes to Egypt this week for talks with Arafat. Cheney said Sunday he had no plans now to meet Arafat because the Palestinian leader had yet to meet U.S. conditions of curbing violence.

If Arafat would "put out the kind of effort that we haven't seen up until now ... then I'd be prepared to meet with him. But to date they have not gotten to that point yet," Cheney said on CNN.

However, Cheney said that Israel should permit Arafat to attend the Beirut summit. "It's our view that the summit is likely to be more productive ... if in fact he's allowed to attend," Cheney said on CBS.

At the summit, Arab leaders are expected to focus on a proposal floated by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, under which Arab nations would offer Israel peace and normal relations in exchange for Israel's full withdrawal from areas it seized in the 1967 Mideast war.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, traveling with President Bush in Latin America, said the United States expects the meeting to produce a "positive declaration" on a peaceful future with Israel that includes normalization of Arab-Israeli relations.

The leader of the militant group Hezbollah criticized Abdullah's initiative Sunday in an address at a massive rally in Beirut's southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold, calling on Arab leaders to reject peace with Israel and supply arms to the Palestinians.

"Sharon and the enemy's army are crushing the Palestinians with iron and fire, and the Arabs respond with peace initiatives," Sheik Hassan Nasrallah told tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims clad in black on the occasion of Ashoura, an Islamic holiday.

Amid chants of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel," Nasrallah said: "Any final communique (from the summit) that does not mention support for the (Palestinian) uprising and resistance is nothing more than a communique written by Arabs with American ink."

A Saudi newspaper quoted Abdullah as saying he believes Sharon has rejected the proposal. "I found out that everyone wants this proposal except for one person and that's Sharon," the daily al-Watan quoted Abdullah as saying Saturday.

Sharon has neither accepted nor rejected the proposal publicly, saying Israel has not seen details. However, he has said a return to the pre-1967 war borders -- meaning a pullout from all the West Bank, Gaza Strip, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights -- would endanger Israel's security.