JERUSALEM Ñ Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat announced that the seven-day period of calm began last week despite the continuation of violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In Gaza, on his return from the Socialist International organization's meeting in Lisbon, Arafat said the seven-day period proposed by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell "began Wednesday," despite the continuation of violence in the area.

"The most important thing is to follow up what has been agreed upon and we are following and I have declared our approval for Mitchell report, for Egyptian-Jordanian initiative, for the declaration which had been declared after the meeting between President Bush and the European leadership in Sweden recently," Arafat said "If there is a will, there is a way."

On Sunday, a Palestinian truck driver was injured near the West Bank settlement of Beit-El after Palestinians fired at his vehicle bearing Israeli license plates. Earlier, two armed Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli troops near the West Bank town of Jenin.

On Saturday, Palestinians opened fire at the West Bank Jewish settlement of Homesh. Palestinians also fired at an Israeli army position in Sanur in the northern West Bank and attacked an army patrol north of the West Bank city of Ramallah. Two bombs were thrown at a security post at the Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus in east Jerusalem. No injuries were reported.

Later, Israel returned the body of an Egyptian policeman believed to have been struck by a stray bullet fired by Israeli troops at Palestinian demonstrators in Rafah, near the Israeli-Egyptian border in the southern Gaza Strip. The demonstration followed clashes with Israeli troops.

On Friday, Palestinians continued to fire mortar bombs at Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and Palestinians clashed with Israeli troops in the West Bank. No injuries were reported.

"This is not 'day one' of anything because the violence continues, we have not seen the cessation of violence," Powell said in Paris.

In Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said that Israel was ready to implement the recommendations of the committee headed by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell after a total cessation of the violence, including a freeze on settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"We are ready to follow the Mitchell report religiously, word by word, station by station," Peres said. [The settlements] "were stopped. In fact there were no new more settlements."

''The only ingredient necessary to get the locomotive of peace on its way, in our view, is security, not occupation. You have security, you'll have freedom,'' Peres said earlier. ''A good neighbor is better than a good gun, and we are looking for a good neighbor.

On Friday, Hizbullah attacked Israeli army positions in the disputed Shebaa Farms wounding two Israeli soldiers. Israeli responded with artillery fire and Israeli warplanes attacked Hizbullah positions on a hill in southern Lebanon.

"Today Lebanon and Syria refuse all kinds of threats and hold Israel responsible for any new aggression and its consequences in the whole region," the official Hizbullah television station announced in Beirut.

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