Mideast peace hopes emerge despite violence

JERUSALEM - Signs that Israel and the Palestinians are striving to pick up the fragments of a peace drive shattered by 11-weeks of violence have emerged despite the killing of six Palestinians in the latest flare-up.

United States officials said they were trying to arrange talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in Washington as early as next week.

A wave of the bloodiest Israeli-Palestinian violence in years exploded in the vacuum of stalled July negotiations, damaging trust carefully nurtured over the seven years since they signed the 1993 Oslo peace accords.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's decision to seek re-elections in a prime ministerial vote in February, after his government lost its ability to function in parliament, has apparently given new impetus to peace efforts.

Poll predictions that Barak would lose to a right-wing candidate has created an urgency for the Israeli leader and Palestinians to forge a historic treaty before voting day. Political analysts say such a deal would boost Barak's chances of victory.

The six Palestinians were killed in four separate shootings in the West Bank and Gaza that erupted hours after Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami wrapped up talks in the early hours of yesterday morning on ending the fighting and renewing stalled peacemaking.

Their deaths brought to at least 325 the number of people - mainly Palestinians but including 38 Israelis -killed in the worst Israeli-Palestinian violence in years.

The latest killings angered the Palestinian Authority which said after its weekly meeting in Gaza that while Israel raised hopes of renewing peace talks, it continued "aggression and military escalation" against the Palestinian people.

Palestinian officials said more talks would be held in the next few days "to find out whether there is seriousness on both sides to reopen the negotiations".

"After that meeting, if they decide to formally resume the talks, they will move to Washington," one official said.

Ben-Ami said he and Arafat did not conduct negotiations in the four-hour meeting but rather put out feelers on restarting the stalled negotiations.

US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said talks US Middle East peace envoy Dennis Ross had with Arafat in Morocco earlier in the week set the stage for the first real movement in Mideast peacemaking in months.

He said Ross concluded Arafat had "a strong desire to end the violence, stabilise the situation and find a way back to peacemaking".

"He (Ross) also found clear agreement that the only way to end this conflict is a negotiated settlement," Boucher said.

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, who met Arafat on Thursday and Barak yesterday, said he and European Union envoy Miguel Angel Moratinos saw signs of hope.

"Mr Moratinos and I have the sense that something has begun to move again...Things are slowly becoming possible again," Vedrine told reporters in Tel Aviv.

- REUTERS

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