AL QUDS, May 25: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon won cabinet approval on Sunday for a US-backed “road map” for peace in a breakthrough that formally committed Israel for the first time to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The cabinet approval set the stage for a possible Israeli-Palestinian summit attended by US President George W. Bush, who had pushed Sharon to accept the most ambitious Middle East peace plan in more than two years.

Sharon overcame opposition to the road map by far-right cabinet ministers and members of his own rightist Likud party by a vote of 12-7 with four abstentions after a stormy six-hour debate, a government spokesman said.

In a separate vote of 16-1, the cabinet rejected any Palestinian right of refugee return to what is now the Jewish state, a proviso likely to be a bump on any road to peace.

“The most important thing now is for Israel to implement (the roadmap) in its entirety,” Palestinian cabinet minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said after the Israeli vote.

Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, a Hamas leader responded to the move by calling the road map “a conspiracy to liquidate the Palestinian cause and resistance”.

Interim peace accords with the Palestinians have spoken only of a permanent settlement based on UN resolutions that call for Israeli withdrawal from occupied land in return for secure and recognised borders, but do not mention a Palestinian state.

The road map also calls for a freeze on Jewish settlement expansion on Israeli-occupied land, a clause that goes against Sharon’s long-held advocacy of settlement-building.

The plan does not refer to a specific Palestinian “right of return” but calls instead for a “fair and realistic solution to the refugee issue” in the proposal’s final phase.

US REACTION: After the approval, the White House welcomed the Israeli cabinet’s acceptance calling it “an important step forward.”