US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to resume peace talks suspended over an Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip, but she did not specify a date.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said earlier the negotiations could not get under way again until Israel reached a ceasefire with Gaza militants behind cross-border rocket attacks.
Abbas' comments touched off a flurry of behind-the-scenes lobbying by Rice with the Palestinians. She later told a news conference that a truce was not a condition for restarting the US-brokered talks on Palestinian statehood.
"I've been informed by the parties that they intend to resume the negotiations and that they are in contact with one another as to how to bring this about," Rice said at a news conference with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
Rice did not say when the next round of talks, which the United States hopes can result in an agreement by year's end, would be held.
Abbas' office issued a statement that did not repeat his condition for talks. The statement said Rice was exerting efforts to "enforce a mutual calm" and Abbas' intention was to "resume the peace process and the negotiations".
Rice said a special US-Israeli-Palestinian committee would meet next week, most likely on Thursday, to examine to what extent the sides were meeting their commitments under a long-stalled peace "roadmap".
The Palestinians had sought such a meeting to put pressure on Israel to meet its obligation to freeze settlement activity. The roadmap calls on Palestinians to rein in militants.
Abbas froze negotiations with Israel on Sunday in protest at an Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip in which more than 120 Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers were killed. Medical workers said about half of the Palestinian dead were civilians.
Israel ended the five-day offensive on Monday but threatened to send troops back into the Hamas-controlled territory if cross-border rocket attacks continued.
It mounted air strikes and a brief ground raid on Tuesday, killing a militant and a baby, medical workers said. Several rockets fired from the Gaza Strip hit Israel yesterday, causing no casualties.
A statement issued by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office after a security Cabinet meeting yesterday said it would act "continuously and systematically" to halt the salvoes and try to weaken Hamas.
Israel, the statement said, wanted to "push forward with negotiations with the Palestinian Authority while maintaining freedom of action in the fight against terror". But a spokesman for Olmert indicated Israel might hold its fire if Gaza gunmen did the same.
"If they were not shooting at our civilian population, we would not have to respond," the spokesman said, voicing a position Israeli officials have expressed in the past.
Rice, who ends a two-day visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank later yesterday, came away from talks with Abbas on Tuesday without any public commitment from the Western-backed leader to resume the negotiations with Israel.
Rice said she was sending David Welch, the US assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, to Cairo, which EU officials see as key to brokering a ceasefire and the reopening of Gaza's border with Egypt.
Source: China Daily/Agencies
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