The conflagration started just moments after Sharon and Likud party members departed. The violence spread rapidly throughout the occupied territories and into Israel itself, with Arab citizens taking to the streets with stones, slingshots and Molotov cocktails. They were countered by the guns of Israeli troops. Protests spread across the Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia to Kenya , as anti-Israel demonstrators took to the streets. Numerous attempts to quell the violence and resume direct negotiations under U.S. auspices failed.
Many observers now discount the ability of the United States to continue as sole mediator.
During this crisis, the necessity and wisdom of opening the peacemaking talks to other international actors has become clear. To convene the Sharm el-Sheikh summit on October 17, it took Egypt's president, the King of Jordan, and the Secretaries General of the United Nations and the European Union. The U.S. did convince Israel to compromise in its insistence that only the United States could conduct an impartial fact-finding inquiry into the cause of the upheaval. That inquiry panel, named on November 7, is headed by former senator George Mitchell, but also includes the foreign minister of Norway, the former president of Turkey, and the foreign policy chief of the European Union. The notion that the status of Jerusalem could be resolved solely through U.S.-directed bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority has ended with the violence of late September.