Jerusalem – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice worked Thursday to bridge gaps between Israel and the Palestinians over the content of a planned Middle East peace conference, with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urging that the meeting deal with the core issues of a final peace agreement.
Rice gave no indication after meetings in the West Bank and Israel whether there had been any progress toward drafting a common document that could be presented to the regional gathering, which is expected to take place in the Washington area in November.
The agenda of the conference called by President Bush has not been set, and the U.S. has not said whom it might invite.
The Palestinians want the conference to produce an outline for a peace deal with a timetable, while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, wary of taking on the politically sensitive issues of a final peace agreement, has spoken about a less binding declaration of intent.
After meeting Rice in Ramallah, Abbas said he expected the regional conference to be a “serious beginning of negotiations leading to the end of Israeli occupation.”
“The time has come for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, living side by side with Israel in security and peace,” Abbas said at a joint news conference. “We assured Secretary Rice of our serious endeavor to reach a framework agreement to implement the final-status issues, which are the borders, Jerusalem, the refugees, settlement issues and water.”
Abbas said he had been meeting regularly with Olmert “in an effort to reach an agreement that will include a timetable of implementation for resolving the final-status issues.”
Olmert, however, said at a meeting of his Kadima party this week that the document being discussed would be a more general “declaration of intent” rather than an agreement on principles for a final peace settlement.
Rice said that the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian document is “something that they will have to work out” and that its purpose would be to lay the foundation for “serious negotiations on the establishment of a Palestinian state as soon as possible.”
“We need a meeting that will advance the cause of a Palestinian state,” Rice said. “From my point of view, a successful meeting has to be one that is substantive, that advances the cause of a Palestinian state.”
Also Thursday, in an Israeli army raid against militants in the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, three Palestinians were killed, hospital officials said. A 17-year-old died when he was run over by an army bulldozer, and two militants were killed in clashes.
