Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Saturday night held a surprise summit, reviving hopes that peace talks can take place after years of violence and mistrust.
Aides to Abbas and Olmert’s officials simultaneously announced late on Saturday that the meeting was to take place within hours, at Olmert’s own residence in Jerusalem.
Although the announcement caught many political figures on both sides off-guard with its timing, it came after days of intense secret negotiations and was being described as a move to build confidence between the two men.
Olmert said on Sunday that he plans to continue meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to advance a common diplomatic agenda.
Addressing his ministers at the start of the weekly Cabinet session in Jerusalem, Olmert described his parley with Abbas Saturday night as ”good” and said he planned to hold a ”continuous dialogue” with the Palestinian leader.
The Jerusalem Post daily quoted Olmert as telling Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that the talks with Abbas ”could create an opening for a better future”.
During the meeting Saturday night, Israel agreed to transfer $100-million in confiscated funds to the Palestinians for humanitarian purposes and to channel 35-million Israeli shekels (more than $8 million) to hospitals in East Jerusalem.
Israel also agreed to ease roadblocks in the West Bank, and the sides decided to form committees to deal with several issues still outstanding between them.
These were the first official talks between the leaders since Olmert took power in January, although in June the pair did meet informally in Jordan, and will be the first summit between an Israeli and a Palestinian leader for nearly two years.
The last peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians collapsed in 2000 and appeared all but dead. Officials had worked for months to push for a meeting and much is at stake for both leaders, who desperately need a peace breakthrough to help with their serious political problems at home.
Abbas and his Fatah party are locked in a hostile and violent showdown with the Islamic militant group Hamas, which leads the Palestinian government.
Last week, Abbas said he would seek early elections, a dramatic challenge to the 10-month-old Hamas government that immediately denounced it as a ”coup attempt”. Although backed by the international community, including Britain, his stance intensified factional fighting between Palestinian security forces and Hamas gunmen, especially in Gaza and increased fears of civil war.
Olmert has lost much of his popularity over his handling of July’s war in Lebanon with Hezbollah guerrillas, which many in Israel believe was fought badly and ended inconclusively. The conflict discredited Olmert’s political programme, including a promise to withdraw from much of the West Bank and settling Israel’s borders by 2010.
Israel has repeatedly said it will not deal with the Hamas-led Palestinian government, elected in March, which refuses to recognise Israel, and Abbas has said that he has failed to change Hamas’s position.
In Gaza, meanwhile, factional fighting continued. In the town of Rafah, gunmen fired on the car of a senior Palestinian security official, wounding him, a bodyguard and a passer-by. The target, Hassan Jarbouh, deputy chief of the Rafah branch of the Preventive Security Service, was last night in a critical condition. — Guardian Unlimited Â