The Israeli army stepped up raids into West Bank cities to net Palestinian militants, underscoring obstacles on the ground to a diplomatic initiative that emerged in the vacuum of the derailed US-sponsored peace plan, known as the road map.

"We don't want to argue with Powell," government spokesman Avi Pazner said, without elaborating, a day after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's deputy warned the secretary of state it would be wrong to give his imprimatur to the alternative initiative.

Pressure has grown on intransigent incumbents on both sides to overcome a long, bloody Middle East stalemate since Israeli opposition doves and Palestinian moderates launched the "Geneva Accord" to international acclaim Monday.

Palestinian authorities have welcomed the initiative but not endorsed the fine print, while Israel's right-wing government has denounced it as treacherous and cranked up raids in West Bank areas after a relative two-month lull.

Israel has also got into a rare public spat with Washington by chiding Powell's decision to hear out the Geneva Accord architects at talks in Washington likely later this week.

An Israeli army spokesman said 27 wanted Palestinians were arrested in overnight swoops into Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's West Bank base city of Ramallah and the northern town of Jenin targeting primarily the militant faction Islamic Jihad.

Three Hamas militants and a Palestinian boy of six were killed by Israeli armoured forces in an incursion into Ramallah Monday, hours before the alternative peace deal took the international stage at a ceremony in Geneva.

Palestinian officials said the raid seemed timed to upset the Geneva launch and was counterproductive as it would provoke militants to hit back, spinning anew a cycle of violence prevailing for much of a three-year-old Palestinian uprising for statehood.

Sharon's government said the incursion pre-empted a fresh wave of suicide attacks and, to reaffirm its case that the symbolic peace pact was dangerous, again accused Palestinian leaders of indulging "terrorism."

Militants have begun Egyptian-mediated truce talks in Cairo.

The Geneva pact envisages a Palestinian state like the road map but goes further in requiring the dissolution of most Jewish settlements from the West Bank and Gaza and the right of Israel to decide how many Palestinian refugees to take back.

The two steps have inflamed Israel's pro-settler right and Palestinian militants respectively. But world leaders past and present have hailed the accord as the basis of future compromise and urged Israeli and Palestinian leaders to capitalise on it.

US officials stressed the six-month-old road map remained the way to go but rebuffed Israel's attempt to discredit the more ambitious Geneva accord and said Powell would meet its initiators in Washington later in the week.

During a visit to Tunisia Tuesday, Powell -- whose State Department is seen by Sharon's government as sympathetic to Palestinian positions -- said he had the right to meet anyone with fresh ideas on an elusive Middle East peace.

"We are not stepping back in any way from our commitment to the road map and we hope that circumstances and conditions will permit the resumption of progress on the road map in the near future," Powell told reporters.

"(But) I do not know why I or anyone else in the US government should deny ourselves the opportunity to hear from others who are committed to peace and who have ideas."