JERUSALEM, (Islamweb & News Agencies) -Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called off the planned meeting between his Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as the intifadha against Israeli occupation in the territories claimed three more lives Friday and Saturday.
The move temporarily ended weeks of preparations for the much-anticipated talks, despite calls by US Secretary of State Colin Powell for the meeting to go ahead, and an earlier green light from Sharon for a negotiated ceasefire.
It also came amid a tensed Middle East, after the US terror attacks, as Palestinian police arrested five journalists, and Israeli police briefly detained two Muslim leaders.
Sharon informed US President George W. Bush of his decision by phone, explaining that the meeting would endanger Israel in the wake of the airborne onslaught which killed thousands of people in New York and Washington on Tuesday, public radio said.
"Given Arafat's behavior in the past and his behavior right now, the prime minister saw that, at this particular time, it would be inappropriate," a senior Israeli official told AFP, adding that the meeting may be held later.
Israeli radio had quoted a political source Thursday as saying the meeting was to have taken place Sunday at Gaza airport, but officials in both camps had refused to confirm or deny the report.
The preparations for ceasefire talks stalled a few hours after Ramzi Khalil Hassuna, 17, was shot in the chest, and four other Palestinians were injured by Israeli soldiers in clashes near the Karni crossing point between Israel and the Gaza Strip, Palestinian hospital sources said.
Early Saturday two 18-year-old Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli occupatio soldiers near the Khan Yunis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, Palestinian hospital sources said.
As the death toll for the year-old Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation climbed to 805, tension was palpable in Israel and the Palestinian territories, three days after the disaster which hit the United States.
Five journalists were arrested and briefly held Friday by the Palestinian police, who seized their equipment, following a demonstration by the Resistance Hamas movement in the Nusseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
After the protest -- staged in memory of an Israeli Arab Resistance bomber who killed three people last week -- was peacefully broken up, Palestinian police arrested a writer and a photographer of the Reuters news agency, an Associated Press cameraman, and correspondent of the Abu Dhabi satellite TV network.
AFP photographer Odd Andersen -- a Norwegian and the only foreign journalist of the group -- was also arrested.
The Resistance bomber's portrait was set up next to a portrait of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born millionaire who is the prime suspect in connection with the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The Palestinian Authority and security services have tried to prevent any press filming or photographing of celebrations following the US attacks.
Meanwhile, Israeli police said they had arrested the Jerusalem mufti, Ekrima Sabri, over his recent meeting with the leader of Lebanon's Resistance Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.
Sabri's counterpart in Ramallah, West Bank, was also held briefly, he said.
Later Friday, two Israeli tanks and a bulldozer moved into autonomous Palestinian territory in Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip, injuring five Palestinians, one seriously, Palestinian security sources said.
The tanks opened fire with heavy machine guns during their 500-metre (yard) incursion, and several houses caught fire, they said.
Two Israeli border guards were injured earlier Friday in the same area, near the Erez crossing point between Israel and the northern Gaza Strip, in an explosion claimed by the Resistance Islamic Jihad group. (Read photo caption below)
As the shockwaves of the US tragedy were still spreading throughout the world, Powell said it was still important for the Israeli-Palestinian meeting to take place following Israel's postponement of the talks.
"We believe a meeting is important to get the process started," Powell told reporters in Washington.
"This (Mideast) conflict isn't going away, and I don't think it's going to be solved by continuing conflict between the two sides," he said.
France's ambassador in Israel, Jacques Huntzinger, was also summoned by Israel's foreign ministry, after he made a distinction between the US terror attacks and those carried out by Palestinian Resistance groups.
A foreign ministry spokesman met with the ambassador and expressed his country's "vigorous protest" at his comments Thursday that it was "completely irresponsible to make a confusion or an assimilation between the situation here and the situation in the United States."
PHOTO CAPTION:
An unidentified wounded Israeli border policeman is carried into a hospital in the coastal Israeli town of Ashkelon on Friday Sept. 14, 2001. Palestinians fired on a military post near a Jewish settlement and grenades were thrown at the entrance to an industrial zone, injuring two Israeli border policemen, the army said. (AP Photo/Gadi Kabalo)