RAMALLAH: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met Palestinian leaders on Monday to prepare for a Middle East conference after vowing to defend Israel’s security but urging bold efforts to make peace.

On her eighth visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories this year in a bid to advance efforts to revive full peace talks after seven years of stalemate, Rice spent the morning locked in top-level talks in Ramallah.

She first met Ahmed Qorei, who heads the Palestinian negotiating team that is battling to draft a joint document with Israel to serve as a basis for the US-sponsored conference later this year.

“We spoke about the need (for Israel) to apply a series of measures on the ground showing people that the negotiations are serious, such as removing checkpoints, releasing prisoners and a halt to settlement,” Qorei said.

Rice also met Prime Mminister Salam Fayyad and President Mahmud Abbas separately at the Palestinian leadership compound in Ramallah, the political capital of the occupied West Bank.

Despite intensive talks for weeks, Israel and the Palestinians remain divided over the joint statement outlining a solution to their decades-old conflict ahead of a meeting in Annapolis, Maryland expected later this year.

The Palestinians want it to tackle the most intractable problems such as borders, refugees and the status of Jerusalem, and a timetabled implementation, while Israel favours a looser statement based on the so-called roadmap.

That internationally drafted peace plan has made next to no progress since it was adopted in June 2003, and has already missed its first deadline for creating a Palestinian state living in peace alongside a secure Israel.

“The negotiations are difficult and challenging, but we have the desire and we have hope,” Abbas said on Sunday.

Palestinian officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Rice was expected to return to the region for a ninth visit in mid-November as part of continued preparations for the peace meeting in the US.

In a speech in Jerusalem on Sunday, Rice vowed that the United States was fully committed to Israel’s security but called on all sides to make the difficult decisions necessary for lasting peace.

“All Israelis should be confident that America is fully behind you, that we are fully committed to your security and that you can thus be bold in your pursuit of peace,” she said.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said there was a chance both sides could make peace before US President George Bush leaves office in January 2009.

“There is no intention to drag out the negotiations without end. There is no reason to again hit the foot-dragging that characterised our talks in the past,” he told the same Saban Forum think-tank.

Israel’s chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, however, impressed on Rice that Israel’s security must come before any Palestinian state.

Rice began her visit late on Saturday, lowering expectations herself by saying she did not expect to reach an agreement this time on the joint document.

No firm date has yet been announced for the conference, and Arab powers likely to be invited to the conference have been sceptical about its chances of success without any serious effort to address the concerns of all involved.

Both sides say they will enter into intensive bilateral talks on a permanent agreement to the Middle East conflict, seven years after such US-sponsored talks last broke down at Camp David in 2000.

But hardliners on both sides oppose a resumption of peace talks.

The radical Islamist movement Hamas, which seized control of the territory from Abbas in June after a week of gunbattles, has condemned the US conference.

Twelve years after prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was killed by a Jewish extremist for his own policy of reconciliation with the Palestinians, Israeli hardline right-wingers are also mobilising against the talks.

Around 2,000 extreme-right Israelis, many of whom live in Jewish settlements built on Palestinian land that are considered illegal under international law, protested outside the hotel where Olmert and Rice spoke in Jerusalem.

The demonstration was the first such rally against Israel’s participation in the current talks with the Palestinians.—AFP