Clinton Trip Scrubbed as Peace Talks Continue

President Clinton late Monday canceled a two-day political trip to California to continue his effort to broker a Middle East peace settlement at the Wye Plantation summit, which goes into a second unscheduled day today.

“Given the importance of the issues at hand, the president, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat believe it is appropriate to stay and continue to work on these important issues,” White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart said.

“We will be out here tomorrow. I can’t speak for beyond that,” he said.

Clinton, who was due to visit Los Angeles today, agreed to continue the summit during a three-way meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat late Monday that lasted just more than two hours.

The talks, which U.S. officials hoped would end Monday, were earlier set back by a fresh act of terrorism in Israel. In its wake, the Israeli delegation first vowed to limit further discussions to issues of security until the Palestinians agreed on an effective plan to prevent the use of territory they control for attacks on Israel.

But participants at the summit said only a few hours later that the Israelis had relented and were discussing other issues. For instance, Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian official Mahmoud Abbas talked about additional redeployments of Israeli troops in the West Bank.

The latest terrorist attack occurred just hours earlier, at the height of rush hour in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba. As soldiers, workers and teenagers lined up for transportation in a crowded bus station, two grenade explosions sent glass, debris and bodies flying through the air. More than 60 people were injured, five seriously. In what Beersheba Mayor David Bonfeld termed “a big miracle,” no one was killed.

David Bar-Illan, a senior advisor to Netanyahu, said that the attack dramatized the failure of the Palestinian Authority to live up to commitments to combat terrorism.

“There will be no other subject discussed except the subject of security,” Bar-Illan told reporters on the fifth day of the U.S.-sponsored peace conference on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

But State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said late Monday, “The work that we think needs to be done is being done.”

Officials also said that Jordan’s ailing King Hussein might be summoned to the Wye Plantation for an emotional appeal to the parties to settle their differences. The monarch, released from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., after treatment for cancer, flew Monday to his house in the Washington suburb of Potomac, Md. One summit participant said that Hussein was “on alert” for a summit appearance but that no decision had been made about when or if he would join the talks.

Minutes after the explosions in Beersheba, a Palestinian man who was seen hurling two grenades at the city’s central bus station was wrestled to the ground by onlookers, beaten and then handed over to Israeli police.

Palestinian authorities identified the suspect as a resident of a village near the West Bank city of Hebron and a member of the militant Islamic Hamas movement, which opposes peace with Israel.

Hamas leaders would not claim responsibility for the attack, but they immediately praised the perpetrator.

“These reactions . . . should continue until the [Israeli] occupation ends,” Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin said in Gaza City. “These are acts of self-defense.”

But at the Wye Plantation, the principal security demand that Netanyahu is placing on Arafat is precisely that he crack down on Hamas and dismantle its vast infrastructure, which the Israelis maintain is used as a launching pad for terrorism.

Arafat finds it difficult to conduct a wide-ranging crackdown, however, because of Hamas’ growing popularity, which is steadily eroding his own following.

Netanyahu also has conflicting constituencies. Even as he appeared to toughen his position at the talks, his political coalition at home was divided over the course of action he should take. Several members of his Cabinet and his ruling Likud Party advocated continuing the summit in the hopes of reaching a security agreement.

But the vocal and influential right wing ordered Netanyahu to pack his bags and come home.

Uzi Landau, a Likud legislator, demanded that the prime minister “stop all negotiations until he can be sure his partners want peace.”

Avner Hai-Shaki, a Knesset member from the right-wing National Religious Party, which also forms part of Netanyahu’s coalition, admonished that “to talk while there is blood in the streets is contradictory.”

The terrorist attack did produce one result Monday that U.S. mediators in Maryland had found difficult to arrange on their own: the first direct talks between Netanyahu and Arafat since Friday.

When word of the attack reached the summit participants early in the day, Arafat telephoned Netanyahu to condemn the act and to pledge the full efforts of the Palestinian Authority to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Later, Netanyahu and Arafat issued a joint statement: “Fighting terror is a vital interest for both sides; freedom from terror and violence is an essential condition of a durable peace.”

They vowed not to “give in to the efforts of extremists to destroy the hope of peace and security for both our peoples.”

And later, Netanyahu and Arafat joined Clinton for three-way talks.

A terrorist attack aimed at marring the peace summit had been widely anticipated, and Israeli security forces have been on alert for weeks. In addition, Hamas has been threatening revenge for last month’s slayings by Israeli soldiers of two of its fugitive militants.

Beersheba is a mid-size city in the Negev desert about 25 miles southwest of Hebron. Its borders with Palestinian-controlled territories are especially porous. The bus station that was attacked is a common transit point for Israeli soldiers headed to Camp Natan, a nearby army base that includes a medical clinic and a high school.

Lilach Oscar, a 17-year-old student, was waiting for her ride to high school when a huge explosion blew the glass from the bus stop shelter and hurled soldiers and civilians into the air. Many landed writhing in the road, she said.

“I started to scream and run the other way, when I heard another loud boom,” she said. “I went into shock and ran like crazy without knowing where I was going. I was shaking and crying like a little girl because I did not want to die.”

Oscar was dazed but not injured.

“I am never getting on a bus again,” she said.

Several soldiers who were waiting for a bus just before 8 a.m. said they saw a young man run toward them and toss a hand grenade.

“Suddenly, there was a big explosion,” Dana Cohen, a 19-year-old soldier, told reporters from a bed at Beersheba’s Soroka Hospital. “Everything was full of smoke, and I fell. . . . Everyone was running and trampling people lying on the floor. I was dragged to the sidewalk by someone.”

Several passersby gave chase to the man seen with the grenades. They caught him and began pummeling him mercilessly, witnesses said, until a group of university students rescued him. He escaped and fled on foot, but blood dripping in his face apparently obscured his vision, and he ran into the side of a bus. Bus driver Avner Yaacov leaped from his vehicle, tackled the man and held him for police.

Bar-Illan said the Beersheba attack was the 10th serious terrorist incident in the past seven weeks. Many of them, he said, were not even condemned by Arafat.

However, Rubin said, “We think there has been an improvement in recent months in the Palestinian cooperation” against terrorism.

As Clinton left the White House on Monday to rejoin the talks, he too deplored the attack but admonished the Israelis and the Palestinians that a failed summit would be even more dangerous.

“The issues are difficult,” Clinton said. “The distrust is deep. The going has been tough. But the parties must consider the consequences of failure and also the benefits of progress.

“I am convinced that reaching a secure, just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians is the best way to ensure that terrorism has no future in the Middle East,” the president said.

Kempster reported from Queenstown and Wilkinson from Jerusalem. Special correspondent Shimon Ifergan in Beersheba also contributed to this report.