Powell to try to salvage Mideast peace plan

11.45am

GAZA - Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas failed to persuade militants today to call a truce with Israel, in another blow to a peace plan US Secretary of State Colin Powell will try to save during a Middle East visit.

Shortly after Abbas' meeting with 13 militant factions ended in Gaza City, Palestinian gunmen attacked a car on a road in central Israel near the West Bank, killing a seven-year-old girl and wounding another child and an adult, medics said.

"Regarding the issue of the ceasefire, it is still under discussion and we have no response up to this moment," Ismail Abu Shanab, a senior leader of the Islamic group Hamas.

But Abu Shanab said a bilateral meeting between Hamas and Abbas might be held on Wednesday.

Mohammed al-Hindi, a senior Islamic Jihad official, told reporters outside Abbas' Gaza office: "We have re-emphasised that resistance is a legitimate right of our people."

No breakthrough had been expected. Facing the prospect of the collapse of the "road map" to peace, the United States said Powell would come to the region on Friday for talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

"We asked the Americans to take the lead in the peace process, and that is what we are getting," Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told Israeli television.

He said US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was likely to follow Powell to Israel on June 29.

Powell was last in Israel and the Palestinian territories in May ahead of a June 4 summit in Aqaba, Jordan, in which US President George W Bush, Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon affirmed the road map that envisages Palestinian statehood by 2005.

Since the three-way gathering, tit-for-tat Israeli-Palestinian attacks have killed more than 50 people and stymied US attempts to put the peace plan into motion.

Sharon has ruled out concessions unless Abbas subdued Hamas, a fundamentalist Islamic group at the forefront of suicide bombings that have killed scores of Israelis since the start of a Palestinian uprising for statehood in September 2000.

But senior Israeli and Palestinian security officials have been holding talks on an Israeli offer to pull troops out of the northern Gaza Strip and West Bank city of Bethlehem, a proposal that appeared to depend on the outcome of truce efforts.

A senior Palestinian official said security talks on Tuesday hit a snag over an Israeli demand to retain control of a north-south Gaza Strip road after any pullback.

"The Israeli offer did not change the reality of the occupation," the official said.

The already-battered road map calls for confidence-building steps including a Palestinian crackdown on militants and a freeze in the expansion of Jewish settlements on land Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.

In Gaza City, John Wolf, the new US envoy charged with implementing the peace plan, met earlier in the day with Abbas and Palestinian security chief Mohammed Dahlan.

After meeting Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Wolf told reporters he aimed to get each side to "implement commitments" made when both sides endorsed the road map at Aqaba.

The moderate Abbas has instead sought a ceasefire deal with the militants, hoping to avoid confrontation that could lead to civil war. The peace plan calls on the Palestinian Authority to dismantle militant groups.

- REUTERS