WASHINGTON, Nov 28: President George Bush assured Israeli and Palestinian leaders that the United States would actively engage in renewed peacemaking, despite deep scepticism over chances for a deal before he leaves office.

Just 24 hours after pledging to try to forge a treaty by the end of 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met Bush for the ceremonial resumption of the first formal peace talks in seven years.

The White House meeting capped a three-day diplomatic flurry, including a 44-nation Middle East conference on Tuesday, that underscored Bush’s aim to achieve in his final 14 months in office what has eluded US leaders for decades.

Once wary of taking a hands-on role in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, Bush said: “I wouldn’t be standing here if I didn’t believe peace was possible.”

Shoulder to shoulder with the two leaders in the White House Rose Garden, Bush said: “One thing I’ve assured both gentlemen is that the United States will be actively engaged in the process and we will use our power to help as you come up with the necessary decisions to lay out a Palestinian state that will live side by side in peace with Israel.”

But there was no sign Bush was planning the kind of sustained personal engagement he had shunned after his predecessor, Bill Clinton, failed to broker a peace accord in 2000 in the twilight of his presidency.

After the White House event, the two sides will continue with a meeting on Dec 12 in Jerusalem.

But serious questions remain about the viability of the new U.S.-sponsored peace effort.

All three leaders — Bush, Abbas and Olmert — are politically weak at home, raising doubts whether they can make good on their promises, and lingering mistrust between Israel and Palestinians will make any progress difficult.

“There’s never a perfect time in the Middle East and so we have to deal with the times that we’ve been dealt,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged on NBC’s “Today Show” a day after the Middle East conference in Annapolis, Maryland.

In a sign of the obstacles ahead, Hamas Islamists who control the Gaza Strip rejected the new peace drive and vowed to undermine it. Violence also flared, with Israeli missiles killing two Hamas naval officers in the southern part of the coastal territory, medical workers said. —Reuters