Israel on Saturday rejected a an agreement by Palestinian factions meeting in Cairo to halt suicide bombings inside Israel without stopping attacks on Israeli soldiers or settlers in occupied land.
A senior Israeli official said such a deal would not be enough to renew Israeli-Palestinian peace talks or set up a proposed summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia.
"I would say that such a halfway measure is a non-starter. What kind of a ceasefire is it when there is no ceasefire and you continue to shoot?" the official said.
But he said that Israel would reciprocate if Palestinian groups ceased all attacks.
"We say that if there will be quiet, if there is no shooting, there will be no military action on our part. But we're not going to sit back and wait until a suicide bombing or an attack on a settlement occurs."
Palestinian Cabinet member and negotiator Saeb Erekat said the director of Sharon's bureau and Qureia's top aide were to meet yesterday to prepare for a summit, a move viewed as crucial to reviving talks under the US-backed "road map" peace plan.
But the Israeli official said continued haggling in Cairo over a truce agreement had thrown this meeting into doubt.
Sharon has vowed to pursue talks with Qureia to advance the road map, a plan which calls for a series of reciprocal steps to end Israeli-Palestinian violence and establish a Palestinian state by 2005.
Plans to hold a summit have been put off for weeks amid disputes over setting the conditions for talks.
Israel has rejected a Palestinian demand for a pre-summit gesture of halting the construction of a West Bank barrier viewed worldwide as a land grab, but which Israel says is needed to keep suicide bombers from reaching its towns and cities.
And Sharon has demanded that Qureia take measures to end violence by militants against Israel. Israel views the talks in Cairo as a first step toward this goal, the official said.
Qureia went to Cairo to try to seal a truce deal, but the talks bogged down as key militant Muslim groups drafted an agreement that omitted any reference to a ceasefire in the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel occupied in a 1967 war.
Another complication arose when Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual head of Hamas, a militant group that has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings, said he remained firmly opposed to Israel's existence in the region.
"We are against a Jewish apartheid state on the land of Palestine," Yassin told the German weekly Der Spiegel. He suggested that the Israelis "found a state in Europe" instead.
Continued violence also cast a shadow on the talks. In the Gaza Strip, Israeli soldiers shot dead three Palestinians on Saturday, including a teenager and two armed Hamas members.
An Israeli military source said soldiers at an outpost near an Israeli community just outside the eastern edge of Gaza had thwarted an attempted attack by shooting at two suspicious figures crawling near the border fence on Friday night.
The source said bodies of two Palestinian men were found near the site on Saturday, dressed in camouflaged fatigues, lying near a 25kg bomb and some grenades.
A Hamas spokesman claimed responsibility for the incident by the two 20-year-olds.
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