[One Palestinian casualty was killed crossing the Gaza-Israel border. More than a dozen people have died in violence since the ceasefire began, including eight Palestinians and six Israelis.]

NICOSIA, (Islamweb & Agencies) - The Middle East was gearing up for another round of high level diplomacy Sunday, with Washington taking centre stage in a bid to firm up and build on the fragile ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Mininster Ariel Sharon left for the United States, where he is expected to drum up his now all too familiar distorted views on the Palestinian Intifadha. Correspondents say he is expected to tell President George W. Bush that Israel cannot keep up what he calls ‘the truce’ indefinitely in the face of continued Palestinian violence.
It will be Sharon's second meeting with Bush in three months, and the talks at the White House Tuesday will also include consulations with US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is to visit the Middle East this week.
En route to the US Sunday, Sharon stopped off in Britain for talks with Prime Minister Tony Blair.
An Israeli official on board Sharon's plane described Blair as "a central figure on the international scene and his influence extends beyond Europe."
US and European diplomats have been pushing to hold together the ceasefire accord, which itself was an attempt to get rolling the wider recommendations of the Mitchell commission aimed at getting the two sides back to peace talks.
The ceasefire is to be backed up with confidence-building measures, including a halt to what is called Palestinian "terror"-Resistance, as well as new Israeli settlement building and an end to the Israeli blockade around the West Bank and Gaza Strip which has crippled the Palestinian economy.
US envoy William Burns was in the region Sunday, visiting Cairo and Amman. After talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Burns said that there was an "urgent need" for further steps to stabilize the truce as well as measures to improve life for besieged Palestinians.
"It's not an easy task but it's one that is very important for the parties themselves as well as the United States and Egypt," and others, said Burns, who had met with Arafat on Saturday.
Later Sunday, Burns travelled to Amman for talks with Prince Ali ben Hussein, standing in for King Abdullah II during his absence abroad.
The meeting covered "efforts aimed at consolidating the Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire and the application of the Mitchell report," the official Petra news agency reported.
Prince Ali spoke of the "need to ensure a clear mechanism to apply the clauses of the Mitchell report," it said.
"Israel must take practical steps to apply the Mitchell report fully and to ensure that the problem is not restricted to security issues in order that favourable conditions can be created for a renewal of negotiations", the agency continued.
Burns is US assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs and a former US ambassador to Jordan. His talks Sunday were part of his Middle East tour aimed at preparing the ground for Powell's trip to the region, which starts Tuesday.
The latest diplomatic round came amid new challenges to the ceasefire Sunday, as a Palestinian Resistance man long wanted by Israel was killed in a West Bank bomb blast, signalling Israel may have abandoned the truce.
Usama Fathi Jawabra, a 29-year-old member of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, was killed when a public telephone booth he was using in Nablus exploded.
Fatah accused Israel of assassinating Jawabra, a known Resistance figure who once spent 15 months in a Palestinian Authority jail for refusing to hand in his weapons and was a commando in the first Palestinian intifada from 1987-1993.
The Israeli occupation army had no comment, but the official on Sharon's plane said the Palestinians had been given a list of what he calls several dozen "terrorists" to be arrested at the weekend and that Arafat's Palestinian Authority had failed to do so.
The official warned: "We demand a 100 percent halt to the violence. Otherwise, there will not be any passage to the next stage" in restarting peace negotiations.
Palestinian officials said at the weekend they had jailed an unspecified number of so-called militants.
Meanwhile, the spiritual leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) vowed in an interview that his group would not honour the ceasefire accord and would keep up its attacks.
Hamas and , Islamic Jihad, are responsible for the majority of anti-Israeli attacks since the signing of the 1993 Oslo