OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 18 May 2003 — The Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers tried to settle some of their sharp disagreements over a US-backed peace plan yesterday in the first such summit since the start of the intifada 31 months ago.

However, there was little expectation of a breakthrough and the meeting was overshadowed by violence. A Hamas bomber killed an Israeli man and his wife in the West Bank, and Israeli troops killed a Palestinian and wounded nine people, including five teens, in the Gaza Strip.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, met at Sharon’s Jerusalem office with a long list of conflicting demands. They sharply disagree over the road map plan to Mideast peace, including over who should make the first move, and it appeared unlikely they would be able to even narrow their differences in one session.

The summit could be a bellwether for future US mediation efforts. If top-level Israeli-Palestinian talks fail to produce results, Washington might have to press the sides harder or even consider imposing solutions.

US President George W. Bush has not spelled out how far he is willing to go in ensuring progress on the road map, a three-stage prescription for ending violence quickly and setting up a Palestinian state by 2005.

Sharon is to meet Bush on Tuesday to discuss more than dozen Israeli objections to the plan, which requires Israel to freeze settlement construction and withdraw from Palestinian towns in the first stage.

At the summit, Abbas planned to ask Sharon to accept the road map unequivocally, lift travel bans on Palestinians and stop hunting suspected militants in order to allow the Palestinians to launch their own campaign against militias, as required by the peace plan.

Israel says it will not budge until Abbas has taken “real steps” against the armed groups, including arrests and weapons sweeps. Regarding the road map, Sharon was not expected to give an answer before his meeting with Bush.

Instead, Sharon was to offer Abbas a troop withdrawal from parts of the northern Gaza Strip, including the town of Beit Hanoun, as a test case. Palestinian security forces would take control there and try to stop rocket fire on Israeli border towns. If the experiment is successful, Israel would pull out of other Palestinian areas, according to the Israeli media reports.

Earlier this week, Israeli troops seized Beit Hanoun in response to renewed rocket fire on the Israeli town of Sderot, not far from Sharon’s sheep farm in the Negev Desert. However, Israeli military reporters have said the main reason for the takeover appeared to be to create a bargaining chip for the summit.

In clashes in Beit Hanoun yesterday, Israeli troops killed a Palestinian. Nine Palestinians were wounded, including a gunman and five teens, doctors said.

In Hebron, a Palestinian disguised as an observant Jew blew himself up in a downtown square, near Jewish settler enclaves. The bomber killed an Israeli man and his wife. The assailant was later identified by relatives as Fuad Qawasmeh, 21, a supporter of Hamas. Palestinian militias have threatened to sabotage the road map, saying they would not halt attacks and would resist forcefully if Abbas tried to disarm them.

The Abbas-Sharon meeting is the first Israeli-Palestinian summit since September 2000 when then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak met with veteran Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Several days after that meeting, Sharon, then the opposition leader, made a demonstrative visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, triggering large-scale Palestinian protests that quickly escalated into an uprising.

Earlier yesterday, Abbas accepted the resignation of Saeb Erekat, a top Palestinian negotiator who stepped down after being excluded from the summit. Erekat’s accessibility and fluent English had made him a sought-after guest on TV news shows and a prominent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Erekat, who participated in negotiations with Israel for a decade, is close to Arafat, whom Israel and the United States are trying to sideline. Erekat’s resignation was apparently prompted by the perceived slight, but growing tensions between Arafat and Abbas might also have played a role.