With warnings of violence multiplying from Jewish settlers in the West Bank town and from Islamic militants, both sides were anxious to reach agreement soon.
Ross and the Israelis reported progress; the Palestinians said substantive differences remain.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat met with Ross last night, and both Palestinian sources and Shai Bazak, a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said after the meeting that agreement did not appear imminent.
Ross made no comment after the meeting. But he suggested earlier that a new deal on the months-overdue pullback agreed to by Israel's previous government could be delayed if Arafat goes ahead with plans to leave today on a weeklong trip to Europe.
Netanyahu has promised to honor the earlier agreement, but wants more security for the 450 Jewish settlers in Hebron. The Palestinians have said his demands would require unacceptable changes to the agreement.
Netanyahu also met yesterday with Jewish settlers from Hebron in an effort to blunt their anger over the emerging deal, which would replace most Israeli troops in the city with armed Palestinian police. Hebron, the last West Bank city under Israeli control, is home to 94,000 Palestinians.
Two settlers in the tense city who said they thought they were being attacked with rocks and bottles fired a burst of pistol shots into a Palestinian building yesterday. Bullets shattered the window of a dentist's office - one whizzed past the dentist's head and lodged in the wall.
Israeli police arrested the settlers.
Baruch Marzel, a settler leader in Hebron, said that when the redeployment takes place: "There will be no way to prevent bloodshed."
"It is just a matter of time," he said. "We are preparing for our defense."
Marzel also suggested what many fear - that settlers might try to sabotage the pullout. "There are 1,000 ways for us to explode the agreement," he said.
Unrelated threats by leaders of the militant group Islamic Jihad have only added to the volatile atmosphere. The group has warned it will carry out attacks to avenge the assassination a year ago of their leader, Fathi Shikaki. Israel is widely believed to have killed Shikaki.
"Our attacks may be delayed because of technical reasons, but they will never be stopped," Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, leader of the Islamic Jihad, told Associated Press Television in Beirut.
Ross's meetings yesterday with Netanyahu and Arafat capped a three-week effort by the American mediator to advance the Hebron talks.
"It is clear that we have further narrowed the differences that exist, but we have not overcome those differences," Ross said. "I believe the differences can be overcome."
But Jibril Rajoub, chief of the Palestinian security forces in the West Bank, told the AP that four substantive issues remained unresolved.
The Netanyahu government's support of settlement expansion has infuriated the Palestinians, who want to establish a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that Israel took over in the 1967 Mideast War.
Following years of delicate negotiation, the Palestinians control most of the Gaza Strip and about a third of the West Bank. Netanyahu has expressed reservations about carrying out further withdrawals agreed to by his predecessors that would put all but "specified military locations" in the West Bank under Palestinian control.
AP PHOTO
Two Jewish settler children play at the Palestinian market in the Israeli section of Hebron, a West Bank town, as a soldier patrols nearby yesterday.