Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert plans an additional Palestinian prisoner release before a high-stakes US-sponsored Middle East peace summit in an effort to bolster the moderate Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, media reported yesterday.
Olmert is examining a Palestinian request to free as many as 2,000 of the 12,000 Palestinian prisoners Israel holds, but has not decided how many people would be freed, or when, the Haaretz daily said.
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad raised the demand in public for the first time in a weekend interview. Fayyad said it was time for Israel to make bold moves to reassure the Palestinian people it is serious about peace negotiations, and that a release of 2,000 prisoners ahead of the conference would help to boost trust.
Meanwhile, Palestinian leaders will ask visiting US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to hand deadlines to Israel and the Palestinians for carrying out longstanding obligations to each other in preparation for the peace conference, a senior Palestinian negotiator said yesterday.
Rice was to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and the lead Palestinian negotiator, Ahmed Qureia yesterday.
The Yediot Ahronot newspaper said Israel would free several prisoners jailed for planning or carrying out attacks on Israelis. In the past, Israel has been reluctant to free such prisoners, but Yediot reported that the prisoners in question have already served dozens of years in jail.
Asked to comment on the reports, Israel government spokesman David Baker replied, ``Israel received a request to release Palestinian prisoners and is considering it.''
Yediot said Israel has discussed an additional prisoner release with aides to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is in the region this week to try to wrest progress on peace moves ahead of the peace summit, expected to take place in Annapolis, Maryland, late this month or early next month.
Because so many families have relatives in Israeli jails, prisoner releases are a matter of high priority in Palestinian society. They are designed to prove to Palestinians that moderation pays and to shore up Abbas in his faceoff against Islamic Hamas militants who seized control of Gaza in June, leaving him just with the West Bank.
Israel has released some 340 Palestinian prisoners in recent months. Most are affiliated with Abbas' Fatah movement, and none belong to Hamas.
Talks between the two sides ahead of the expected conference have been troubled by Israel's reluctance to spell out how it hopes to resolve longstanding issues that have tormented peace talks in the past -- final borders, sovereignty over disputed Jerusalem and a solution for Palestinian refugees from the war that followed Israel's creation in 1948.
The immediate obligations of Israel and the Palestinians are spelled out in the first phase of the three-phase "road map" peace plan, which was dormant for four years, but has been revived as a way of building confidence between the two sides.
Under the plan, Israel is required to freeze settlement expansion, dismantle dozens of illegal settlement outposts, halt its frequent army raids into West Bank towns and reopen Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem. The Palestinians have to disarm militants, collect illegal weapons and reform their security forces.
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