Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni will on Sunday meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Egypt, the highest-level such contact since radical faction Hamas won a January election.
“Mrs Livni and Mr Abbas will meet on Sunday [at a meeting] in which Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres will participate,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mark Regev told Agence France-Presse.
Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat confirmed that Abbas and Livni, who is official number two to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, would meet on the margins of the World Economic Forum in Sharm el-Sheikh on Sunday.
The two will discuss ways “to return to the negotiation table” and “to prepare a summit between Abbas and Olmert next month,” Erekat told AFP.
The Abbas-Livni meeting will mark the highest-level contact between the Palestinian leader and an Israeli official since Hamas won January’s Parliamentary election and went on to form a government, which is boycotted by the West.
Peres nevertheless downplayed the importance of the meeting, saying the talks would not focus on issues relating to peace negotiations, which have made little progress since the stalled Middle East road map was launched in 2003.
“During this meeting, we will not talk about borders but economic matters for which there is no reason to leave hanging,” Peres, who is responsible for economic ties with the Palestinians, told army radio.
The talks will come the same day that Olmert departs for Washington where he is to meet President George Bush for the first time since his election.
The premier has vowed to redraw the borders of Israel by leaving parts of the occupied West Bank, but retaining the largest Jewish settlements, with or without agreement from the Palestinians.
But aides preparing the ground for Tuesday’s summit with Bush have urged Olmert to downscale his ambitions, warning that Washington remains committed to talks and is opposed to Israeli unilateralism.
Aides had suggested the impromptu summit could help dispel Palestinian accusations that Israel wishes to use the election of the Hamas government as a pretext to push ahead with a unilateral withdrawal in the West Bank.
Abbas, a moderate from the former ruling Fatah faction, is committed to a negotiated settlement to the Middle East conflict despite the rise to power of Hamas, which refuses to recognise Israel’s right to exist and renounce violence.
As president of the Palestinian Authority and chairperson of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, peace negotiations are the responsibility of Abbas rather than Hamas.
The Israeli government has said, however, he should not act as a fig leaf for Hamas. Livni herself has dismissed Abbas as irrelevant.
Foreign ministers of a number of other countries, including Israel’s regional allies and key Middle East peace brokers Egypt and Jordan, are also expected to attend the summit.
Earlier this month, Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz, of the dovish Labour party, called for the revival of the moribund peace talks with Abbas, but Olmert’s office rejected the initiative as premature.
According to the Maariv daily, Israeli officials have been holding secret talks with officials in Abbas’s office to find ways to bypass the Hamas government, with which Israel refuses to have any dealings over its refusal to recognise the Jewish state’s right to exist and to renounce violence. — AFP