Violence doesn't dim cease-fire hope

TEL AVIV, Israel -- U.S. efforts to achieve a cease-fire in Israeli-Palestinian fighting gained momentum Sunday despite a Palestinian shooting attack that claimed the life of an Israeli teenager, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem and an Israeli incursion into Bethlehem.

Israeli and Palestinian security officials held talks Sunday night at the urging of U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni, who said he was determined not to let violence undermine his efforts to quell the fighting that has raged here for nearly 18 months.

"These attacks will not deter my efforts to continue to work with both sides to bring the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation to an end," the retired Marine Corps general said after the shooting in the central Israeli town of Kfar Sava. "At the same time, it is critical that the Palestinian Authority take responsibility and act against terror and punish those responsible. Now is the time to get a cease-fire."

A senior Palestinian official told the Los Angeles Times that the security meetings were technical talks on Israel's withdrawal from all Palestinian-controlled territories as a prelude to a cease-fire.

Speaking in Bahrain, Vice President Dick Cheney said he hoped the U.S. mission will bear fruit by the time he lands here for talks today. The vice president is to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and has left time on his schedule for meetings with Palestinian leaders, a senior U.S. official told the Associated Press.

Hours before Zinni held his third meeting in four days with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat in the West Bank city of Ramallah, a Palestinian fired Sunday with a pistol on a main street in Kfar Sava.

Amar Shakhshear, 25, killed Noa Orbach, 16, and wounded 15 people before he was gunned down by bystanders and police officers. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia linked to Arafat's Fatah movement, later said he was a member but had acted on his own.

Two hours after the shooting, a Palestinian carrying a bomb hurled himself at a municipal bus in Jerusalem's French Hill neighborhood, blowing himself up and lightly wounding several people. Islamic Jihad, a militant Islamic group, took responsibility.

Later, police said they found the body of a Palestinian near the Jewish neighborhood of Pisgat Zeev, built on land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War. Police said they thought the unidentified man was blown up on the way to carrying out a bombing attack in Jerusalem.

Also Sunday, Israeli troops and tanks briefly rolled into the center of Bethlehem in the West Bank, waging fierce gun battles with Palestinian fighters near the Church of the Nativity, on the site where Christians believe Jesus was born, and killing a gunman with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade before withdrawing.

Before Sunday's attacks, Israel said it was willing to meet a key Palestinian demand and withdraw its troops from areas under Palestinian control.

Israel Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and senior Palestinian official Ahmed Qureia strongly suggested that Sunday's late meeting meant the sides have agreed to coordinate an Israeli pullout from the Palestinian areas in the near future.

Ben-Eliezer said he was optimistic a cease-fire could be reached soon.

"The declaration of a cease-fire can be achieved within 48 hours," Ben-Eliezer told Channel Two TV. "The problem is what will happen after a declaration of a cease-fire."

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said Arafat was committed to working with Zinni on implementation of the U.S. truce plan. "And we need monitors to monitor the implementation by both sides," he told CNN's Late Edition on Sunday.

White House spokesman Sean McCormack said the Bush administration was open to considering U.S. monitors.

"If both parties thought monitors would be an action that would make a positive contribution, and both parties would have to agree, we would consider the request," he said.

-- Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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