Barak meets Clinton, violence continues

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, has held talks with President Clinton in Washington on ways of ending the violence in the Middle East.

Mr Barak gave few details of the meeting, which he said had been aimed at stabilising the situation and implementing the peace deal with the Palestinians reached at Sharm el-Sheikh.

Mr Clinton saw the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, on Thursday.

In further violence, Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian youth at the Erez checkpoint between Israel and the Gaza Strip, and shelled several locations in the West Bank; a Palestinian accused of collaborating with Israel was shot dead; and a convoy carrying the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, Mary Robinson, was hit by a bullet. More than two-hundred people have been killed in six weeks of clashes, the vast majority of them Palestinians.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service