Israeli and Palestinian leaders to meet if soldier freed

JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will hold his first peace summit with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas if gunmen in the Gaza Strip release a captive Israeli soldier, Olmert's senior deputy said yesterday.

Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres's remarks came after a Bahraini newspaper quoted Abbas as saying a deal was in place to free Corporal Gilad Shalit, whose abduction in a deadly June 25 border raid plunged Israeli-Palestinian ties to a new nadir.

"Abu Mazen (Abbas) should be invited to talks, and I believe the prime minister will do so in the coming days. Negotiations must be launched on the basis of the 'road map'," Peres told Israel's Army Radio, referring to a US-led peace blueprint.

"When this (captive) situation is resolved, it (a meeting) will take place," he said.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Tuesday he was hoping for "positive" news in the next 48 hours on whether Israel would lift an air and sea blockade on Lebanon.

"I don't want to raise any false hopes, but I hope that in the next 48 hours we will have some news on that, constructive, positive news," he told reporters after holding talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in the port city of Alexandria.

Israel has kept an air and sea embargo on Lebanon since its 34-day war with Hizbollah ended on August 14. Israel says the blockade is aimed at preventing Hizbollah from re-arming.

An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said Israel would lift its blockade once the Lebanese army, helped by international forces, could enforce an arms embargo on Hizbollah that he called "an essential element in the ceasefire".


"When they are ready to enforce the arms embargo, Israel will be ready to move," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.

Annan had announced yesterday he would appoint a secret envoy to work for the release of the two Israeli soldiers whose capture by Hizbollah guerrillas triggered the war.

Israeli officials said Annan's role was to secure the release of the soldiers, not to mediate. Hizbollah gave a cautious response, backing only indirect negotiations to secure an exchange of prisoners from both sides.





Diplomacy between Israel and the Palestinians was deadlocked before Shalit's capture, ever since Hamas Islamists took over the Palestinian Authority in March after defeating Abbas's more moderate Fatah movement in elections two months earlier.

Israel, backed by Western nations, wants Hamas to abandon its charter calling for the Jewish state's destruction, and to renounce violence, as a precondition for talks. Abbas argues he could still be Israel's interlocutor, circumventing Hamas.

An Abbas aide said the president had yet to be invited for a summit with Olmert. The two leaders have met only informally, at a conference in Jordan, since Olmert took power in May.

"We believe that any time Mr Olmert is ready to meet, the meeting should be very well prepared because what counts should be the substance," the aide, Saeb Erekat, told Reuters.

An Israeli political source said Olmert has held off on a summit so far because he expects Abbas to demand the release of some of the thousands of Palestinians jailed in Israel.

PRISONER SWAP STAKES

Olmert wants Shalit, whose captors include Hamas militants, to go free before discussing any such amnesty, the source said. Complicating matters for Israel is its parallel efforts to retrieve two soldiers seized by Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrillas in a July 12 raid also aimed at forcing a mass prisoner release.

Abbas told Bahrain's Akhbar al-Khaleej newspaper that a swap had been tentatively agreed for Shalit's release.

"An agreement has been reached about exchanging prisoners that is based on Egypt taking the soldier as a deposit, and after that the number of Palestinian prisoners-of-war would be announced," Abbas said.

Erekat said talk of a deal was "premature", as did Peres.

"Everything that has been published so far is in the realm of speculation," Peres said. "No deal has been sealed."

In Gaza, representatives of Hamas and of the Popular Resistance Committees, another group that took part in Shalit's abduction, described negotiations on his release as stalled.

"Egyptian mediation is the only mediation on offer but there is no movement in this matter," said Hamas political leader Osama al-Muzaini.

An Israeli security source said Ofer Dekel, Olmert's envoy on the hostage crisis, was recently in Cairo to confer with Egyptian mediators. There was no immediate comment from Egypt.

Israel launched offensives in Gaza and Lebanon following the troop abductions. Around 1,400 Palestinians and Lebanese, most of them civilians, have been killed, as have 158 Israelis.

The flare-up in violence, as well as Olmert's failure to secure the three soldiers' return, sapped the popularity of his plan to follow up last year's Israeli withdrawal from Gaza with similar moves in the West Bank, another territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war and where Palestinians seek statehood.

Olmert told a parliamentary panel on Monday that his unilateral West Bank "realignment plan" was on hold, stirring speculation that he would seek to engage Abbas in new talks.

- REUTERS