Barak Halts Peace Talks After Two Israelis Are Kidnapped and Slain

Israel on Tuesday abruptly suspended crucial peace talks, which had begun to show hints of progress, after the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli restaurateurs, apparently by masked Palestinian gunmen.

The bodies of the two Tel Aviv men were discovered Tuesday evening near the West Bank town of Tulkarm, the Israeli army said. Israeli television reported that the pair, accompanied by an Israeli Arab, had gone to Tulkarm to shop and had stopped to eat in a restaurant.

There, masked Palestinians kidnapped the three, shot the two Jews dead and spared the Arab, television reported. Palestinian police turned the bodies over to the Israeli army.

Branding the slayings a “horrendous” deed, caretaker Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak recalled his negotiating team from talks being held in the Egyptian resort of Taba. The talks were frozen for at least 24 hours and may not resume until Sunday, if then, officials said.

The Palestinian Authority quickly condemned the murders as well, promising to investigate what it called “suspicious” criminal acts. The radical Islamic Hamas movement was reported to have claimed responsibility.

Until the killings Tuesday, the negotiations had been seen as the most serious in some time, infused with a new sense of urgency and determination after nearly four months of bloody clashes that have claimed more than 370 lives, the majority of them Palestinian.

The talks represent the last chance for Barak to try to strike a deal before a prime ministerial election in two weeks. He lags far behind his opponent, right-wing hawk Ariel Sharon, who has made it clear that he is less inclined to make concessions to the Palestinians in the interest of a final settlement.

The recent talks had been held in an atmosphere of unusual cordiality. Israeli officials said the Palestinians--perhaps fearing a Sharon victory--had shown more pragmatism than in earlier, fruitless sessions and had for the first time presented their own ideas and proposed maps that allowed for some Jewish settlements to remain in the West Bank.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat was quoted in a London newspaper as having told visiting British lawmakers that a Sharon victory would be a “real disaster” for peacemaking efforts. He had not previously commented publicly on the Israeli campaign.

Still, even before Tuesday’s killings, senior officials from both sides said it was highly unlikely that an agreement would be reached in Taba before the Feb. 6 election.

“I am a realist, and this is very, very difficult,” Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, who heads the Israeli delegation, said in Jerusalem, where he briefed Barak on developments. “I see the chance as not especially high because of the time and because of the weight of the issues.”

Earlier Tuesday, Barak used a campaign appearance in Tel Aviv to propose a power-sharing arrangement for Jerusalem, the holy city that both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital.

Barak told a friendly crowd of high school students that Israel would have to share with the Palestinians a “joint administration” of Jerusalem’s walled Old City while retaining sovereignty over Jewish holy sites.

A senior Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, rejected Barak’s proposal out of hand. Various formulas for shared sovereignty have been proposed previously.

“We seek full Israeli withdrawal from East Jerusalem and [for Israel] to leave the Old City under our sovereignty,” Erekat told reporters in Taba. “We will not consider anything short of full Palestinian sovereignty.”

In contrast to all recent Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the Taba talks are taking place without U.S. mediation. The new Bush administration does not yet have a Middle East team in place. Ever since the collapse of former President Clinton’s Camp David summit in July, the Palestinians have bitterly criticized what they saw as a pro-Israeli bias among Clinton’s Middle East envoys, especially those who are Jewish.

Numerous Israeli politicians, especially on the right but also from within Barak’s government, were already opposed to holding the negotiations at a time when Palestinian and Israeli forces continue to clash, and when Barak is only a caretaker prime minister after his sudden resignation last month.

Tuesday’s killings could further erode support for negotiations. Sharon said the deaths proved “the continuous chain of terrorism,” and he demanded that talks halt.

The two dead restaurateurs, whose names were not released but who were said to be in their late 20s or early 30s and related to each other, were the second and third Israeli civilians to be killed in the West Bank in less than a week. Last Wednesday, the body of a 16-year-old boy was found. He reportedly had been lured to the West Bank via an Internet romance and was shot and knifed to death in Ramallah.