Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was heading for Washington and tough talks with US President George W. Bush, who has demanded he ease Palestinian suffering and rising civilian death tolls ahead of a possible US campaign against Iraq.
The visit comes a day after six Palestinians, three of them civilians, and one a four-year-old boy, were killed by Israeli occupation forces.

The daily Yediot Aharonot said Sharon will make clear in his seventh meeting with Bush on Wednesday "that Israel will not pay with its security the price the Arab countries and Europe are demanding as a condition for their support in the war to topple Saddam Hussein," in particular a swift pullback from occupied land.

The Israeli cabinet met Sunday to discuss US pressure for restraint as Washington tries to build an anti-Iraq coalition among Arab countries which already accuse the Bush administration of being overtly pro-Israeli.

Security officials said that any attempt to ease the suffering of hundreds of thousands Palestinians locked up in reoccupied West Bank cities for four months would present a renewed security risk to Israel, where two resistance bombers launched attacks last week.

Sharon is also expected to reiterate his message to Bush that Israel will respond to any Iraqi attack if Baghdad launches missiles at it.

Israel exercised restraint in the 1991 Gulf War when it was hit by Iraqi missiles, but has said this time it may strike back, despite calls from Washington not to do so because Israeli involvement would complicate US ties with reluctant Arab allies.

Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer did however announce late Sunday that he was considering a troop pullback from the southern West Bank town of Hebron in a bid to ease conditions.

Israeli occupation forces occupied most West Bank cities in mid June after a spate of resistance bombings, but pulled back from Bethlehem in August under an agreement whereby Palestinian security occupation forces would stop anti-Israeli attacks.

However, the killing of a low-ranking Palestinian resistance man from Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement in a booby-trapped telephone booth late Sunday -- a sophisticated hit instantly blamed on Israel -- strained even that fragile agreement, the only security accord between the two sides to have actually lasted in recent months.

Leaflets circulated by Fatah said the killing of 25-year-old Mohammed Hussein Abayat broke the understanding under which Israel withdrew from Bethlehem in return for security guarantees.

Abayat was the third member of his extensive family -- accused by Israel of running arms smuggling and activities -- to be slain in an apparent "targeted killing," although the occupation army made no comment on the death.

The Israeli daily Haaretz said the occupation army may have killed the wrong man and been trying to target his brother Nasser, who it said heads the Fatah-linked resistance man group, the Tanzim, in Bethlehem.

As the death toll of two years of fighting rose steadily toward the 2,600 mark, EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten said in Cairo that Israel had failed to comply with a number of UN resolutions and might have achieved peace already with the Palestinians if it had.

"Israel is not complying with a number of Security Council resolutions," Patten said after talks with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher.

"I think it is extremely regrettable that it's not" complying, he said. "I think it if it had complied with Security Council resolutions, we might well have had peace some time ago."

PHOTO CAPTION

A masked Palestinian fighter of Fatah holds a machine gun in front of a mosque in the Rafah refugee camp prior to a march of mourning for two killed fighters October 14, 2002. An explosion in a public telephone booth near Bethlehem that killed a Palestinian resistance man raised the spectre on Monday of revenge attacks after Yasser Arafa's Fatah faction blamed Israel for the blast. REUTERS/Jose Manuel Ribei