Jerusalem – Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will meet in Egypt on Monday for talks with two neighboring Arab leaders alarmed by Hamas’ takeover of the Gaza Strip.
The meeting will be hosted by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and attended by King Abdullah II of Jordan in the Sinai resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Israeli and Palestinian officials said Thursday. Hamas leaders will be excluded from the four- way meeting, which is designed to show Arab and Israeli support for Abbas, a leader of the secular Fatah party, and other moderate Palestinians.
The political separation of Gaza, an impoverished coastal strip that borders Egypt, from the West Bank, a more prosperous territory adjacent to Jordan, has troubled the leaders of these two neighbors – the only Arab countries that have peace agreements with Israel – over the potential consequences of instability on their borders.
Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, a 79-year-old Islamic political movement and Mubarak’s chief opposition. Although Israeli analysts say Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood operate independently, Arab analysts say Mubarak must be careful not to inflame Islamic activists in his own country as he deals with Hamas.
“He’s worried about his regime – he doesn’t like the Islamists, period,” said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian sociologist and democracy activist. “He can’t try a moderate approach to Hamas when he also doesn’t with his own Islamist problem.”
Mubarak’s most pressing short-term concern is Egypt’s roughly 8-mile border with Gaza, patrolled by Israeli forces until they withdrew from Gaza in the fall of 2005. Egypt is limited in how many troops it can deploy along the frontier – a prime weapons-smuggling route into Gaza – under the terms of the 1978 Camp David peace accords with Israel.
Palestinians in Gaza, hemmed in by Israeli-controlled passages and security fences, have pushed over the barrier and flooded into the Sinai by the thousands before.
Jordan’s Abdullah also faces a potential problem arising from Gaza’s separation from the West Bank. Some Israeli leaders have said Jordan, most of whose residents are of Palestinian descent, should become the Palestinian state.
In another development, 35 Gazans who had been stuck at the main Gaza-Israel passenger crossing for several days were sent to Egypt via Israel late Wednesday, an Israeli army spokeswoman said Thursday. Among those who left were gunmen from Abbas’ Fatah movement and their families.
By midday, 60 Palestinian- Americans had left Gaza for Jordan, and eight World Bank employees also left the strip.
