AL QUDS: The Palestinians are hoping that their prime minister Mahmud Abbas will convince the Bush administration on his maiden trip to Washington this week to put more pressure on the Israelis to implement the roadmap for peace.

“The Palestinian delegation’s visit is aimed at informing the US administration of the obstacles standing in the way of the peace process and the roadmap,” Palestinian parliament speaker Ahmad Qorei told AFP.

US President George W. Bush gambled his political future by getting personally involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and bringing Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon together at Aqaba in Jordan on June 4 to kickstart the roadmap.

But the blueprint, which paves the way for the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005, has made a sluggish start and Bush invited the Palestinian premier to the White House in a bid to rekindle it.

Abbas’ trip, the highest-ranking visit by a Palestinian official to the United States since Yasser Arafat’s talks with Bill Clinton in January 2001, will complete his legitimisation on the world scene, following the Aqaba summit where the veteran Palestinian leader was not invited.

Palestinian information minister Nabil Amr told AFP that the visit was aimed at giving “fresh impetus” to the roadmap.

He added that the Palestinians would ask Bush to make a clear statement “demanding that the building of the separation fence and settlement activity be halted, and that the siege on president Arafat be lifted”.

Amr was referring to the 350-kilometre fence being erected between the West Bank and Israel to prevent Palestinian militants from infiltrating.

The Palestinians accuse Israel of using the fence to unilaterally determine the borders of a future Palestinian state and of wanting to “ethnically cleanse” the West Bank with a de facto annexation of its most fertile regions.

Among the other Palestinian demands to take the political process forward are a release of the estimated 6,000 Palestinians detained in Israeli jails, the end of the siege on Arafat’s office in Ramallah and a timetable for further army withdrawal from reoccupied areas in the West Bank.—AFP