JERUSALEM (Islamweb & News Agencies) - Israeli-Palestinian gunfire echoed through the West Bank and Gaza Strip overnight after a day of bomb blasts and missile strikes, mangling any prospect for a diplomatic breakthrough to end 10 months of bloodshed.Palestinian Resistance men fired on Israeli positions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip late Wednesday, the occupation army said, after a day of tit-for-tat violence that included two Israeli missile strikes and a Palestinian bombing.
Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and War Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer called for high-level talks with Palestinian officials on ending their uprising against Israeli occupation that erupted 10 months ago.
But Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, on a one-day trip to Turkey, repeated a pledge not to hold peace talks until violence completely ceased and he blasted his Palestinian counterpart, President Yasser Arafat.
Waging a furious war of words, Egypt's foreign minister had days earlier branded Israel's government a ``gang of assassins'' because of its policy of extra-judicial killings of intifadha activists that it calls the policy self-defense.
More than 650 people have been killed, most of them Palestinians, since the start last September of a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip dating back to the 1967 Middle East war.
Peres, on a tour of the Karni Industrial Zone in Gaza, a joint Israeli-Palestinian project that is the rotting fruit of years of on-and-off peacemaking, called for urgent talks.
Ben-Eliezer, accompanying Peres on the Gaza tour, told reporters: ``I completely support Foreign Minister Shimon Peres holding high-level talks in order to send a message to Yasser Arafat to stop the fire.''
VIOLENCE MOVES SIDES AWAY FROM TALKS
But every exchange of gunfire, bomb blasts and missile strikes have moved the sides farther away from any initiative to get them back to the negotiating table. U.S. pleas to end the bloodshed have been disregarded. (Read photo caption below). A Palestinian bomber died after detonating a bomb when an occupation soldier approached to inspect his car at a checkpoint near an internationally illegal Jewish settlement in the West Bank's Jordan Valley.
The force of the explosion blew the car apart and threw body parts into the air. The vehicle was left a charred and smoldering wreck, half on one side of a dirt road, its other half on the other. The occupation soldier was lightly hurt by shrapnel.
Later, two other Israeli occupation soldiers were hurt by a roadside bomb which exploded on a hill overlooking the West Bank city of Nablus, prompting the missile strike on a security post in the town which was used by Palestinian forces loyal to Arafat.
The Islamic Resistance Palestinian group Hamas claimed responsibility for both bombings.
No one was hurt in the Israeli missile strike. An earlier Israeli air strike on security targets in nearby Salfit, which was launched in retaliation for the killing of a Jewish settler by Palestinian Resistance men Tuesday, also caused no casualties.
PHOTO CAPTION:
A Palestinian bomber blew himself up at an Israeli military checkpoint on August 8, 2001, injuring a soldier, and Israel bombarded two Palestinian security targets in a new spasm of violence in the West Bank. (Reuters Graphic)