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US to broker talks with Israelis and Palestinians

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is planning a series of three-way meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in a major shift of US efforts to broker a peace deal and establish a Palestinian state, a senior US official said on Tuesday.

Following six years of a virtual hands-off policy toward the Arab-Israeli dispute under President George W. Bush, Rice will bring Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas together for their first three-way meeting on Feb. 19, US and Israeli officials announced.

"Our expectations are that this is an initial opportunity for these two leaders to start a discussion about those issues that would concern the framework of a possible Palestinian state," said Rice's spokesman, Sean McCormack.

"It is their first opportunity to discuss these in more than six years," he said, referring to a breakdown in peace negotiations since a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation erupted in late 2000.

Rice had already announced her intention to host the Abbas-Olmert meeting in the middle of this month.

But McCormack said she intended to pursue the three-way format in a significant departure from Bush's past practice of remaining aloof from the intricacies of Israeli-Palestinian deal-making while he focused on the conflict in Iraq and the broader "war on terrorism."

"I would expect you would see more of the tripartite format as opposed to just the Israelis and Palestinians" meeting, McCormack said.

"We would hope that the Israelis and Palestinians would take advantage of this particular forum" to reach agreements on everything from the "most mundane" issues of security, economics and trade to the "most politically sensitive" questions of forming a Palestinian state, he said.

The Bush administration has been under growing pressure from Arab and European allies to invest more effort in breaking the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock, seen as fueling a global rise in Islamic radicalism.

Rice has held many fruitless separate meetings with Israelis and Palestinians over the past two years focused primarily on ending attacks on Israel by Islamic radicals.

Last month during her latest tour of the region, she announced a new approach that would deal in parallel with security matters and so-called "final status" issues involving the borders and powers of a future Palestinian state, the status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees.

The US plan was endorsed on Friday by the top diplomats from Russia, the EU and the UN, who together with the US make up a group known as the "Quartet" of Middle East mediators.

McCormack reaffirmed on Tuesday that any agreement between the two sides should include recognition of the Quartet principles.
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