JERUSALEM, March 29: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Israel on Saturday for the second time this month at the start of three days of talks aimed at boosting the faltering Middle East peace talks.
Rice will start her visit at a work meeting over dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in his Jerusalem residence ahead of a series of talks with top Israeli and Palestinian officials over the next two days.
The top US diplomat was also scheduled to meet Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in Amman, Jordan on Sunday and again on Monday.
Rice said that her meetings will focus on efforts to ease Israeli travel restrictions on Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, which the Palestinians have repeatedly called for.
“I will spend a good deal of time on issues concerning the West Bank and issues concerning the ability to provide better life for people of the West Bank, including ways to improve movement access,” Rice told reporters onboard her plane.
Rice, who will hold a joint meeting with the top Israeli and Palestinian peace negotiators during her visit, said that she did not intend to pressure the parties.
“I am not coming to insert American ideas into the process. I think they are doing a lot of work on their own but I do want to talk to them to get some sense of how it is going,” she said.
Rice will attempt to renew the bi-weekly meeting between Olmert and Abbas, who suspended their regular get-togethers in the wake of a deadly Israeli operation in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip last month.
The peace talks were revived in an international conference in the United States last November after a seven-year hiatus, with both leaders vowing to try to ink a historic deal by the end of 2008.
But the talks have since made little visible progress and were marred by Israel’s settlement activity in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, a deadly attack on a Jewish religious school in Jerusalem and Gaza violence.
Despite the set-backs, a senior Israeli official this week said that the two sides have made “considerable” headway in the peace talks, as chief Israeli negotiator Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and her Palestinian counterpart former prime minister Ahmed Qorei continued holding intensive meetings.
On Sunday, Rice will hold a three-way meeting with Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, where she is expected to press the two sides to carry out their road map commitments.
Under the road map — drafted in 2003 by the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union — Israel is to freeze settlements and the Palestinians are to stop violence.
Last week, Barak gave the green light for the deployment of 600 Palestinian policemen in the northern West Bank town of Jenin. Israel has also promised to ease travel restrictions across the West Bank.
Abbas on Saturday accused Israel of splitting the Palestinian territories into isolated cantons to prevent the creation of a state despite its pledge to peace efforts.—AFP