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Rice calls on Israelis, Palestinians to resume peace talks

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called on Israel and the Palestinians yesterday to resume US-sponsored "peace talks" sus-pended over Israel's offensive in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

Rice said during talks in Cairo that only negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority could lead to lasting peace and brushed aside Egyptian calls for a ceasefire between Israel and the Islamist movement Hamas in Gaza.

"Negotiations ought to resume as soon as possible," Rice told reporters in Cairo, where she consulted Egyptian leaders on how to defuse the Gaza crisis and appease Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

"I am going to have discussions with the parties about how we try to keep this process going, given that obviously there are going to be spoilers," she said before flying to Tel Aviv and then going to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

"I continue to believe that they can get to a deal by the end of the year if everybody has got the will to do it," Rice said on Monday in the plane taking her to Cairo.

"The Annapolis process is hardly underway. We are three months into trying to resolve a conflict that has been going on for 50 years," Rice told journalists accompanying her before making a stopover in Brussels.

Israeli forces killed 123 Palestinians -- many of them civilians, the Palestinian Health Ministry said -- in a five-day assault on northern Gaza that Israel said was launched to counter rocket salvoes by Hamas militants.

That mission ended on Monday but sporadic violence has persisted.

Rice said Israel had the right to defend itself and said Hamas was trying to wreck Palestinian statehood talks between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, which Washington hopes will lead to an accord by the end of this year.

"Hamas is doing what might be expected, which is using rocket attacks on Israel to arrest a peace process in which they have nothing to gain," Rice said.

Abbas suspended talks with Israel over the Gaza bloodshed. Olmert has called for negotiations to resume but threatened to take further military action in the Hamas-controlled territory to curb rocket attacks.

The secretary of state refused to make any comparison between Israel's response to the rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, considered disproportionate by much of the international community, and the war launched by Israel against Lebanon's Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 during which it refused to call for a ceasefire, sparking US sympathy for Lebanon.

"I do not think we want to start drawing parallels between what I consider to be two very different situations," Rice said.

"But does the United States want to see the violence stop? Yes. And are we concerned about innocent people who have been caught in a crossfire in Gaza? Absolutely," she said.
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