Olmert and Abbas may meet
Tuesday, September 5th, 2006| By Dan Williams JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will seek a peace summit with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas if gunmen in the Gaza Strip release a captive Israeli soldier, Olmert’s senior deputy said on Tuesday.
Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres’ remarks came after a Bahraini newspaper quoted Abbas as saying a deal was in place to free Corporal Gilad Shalit, whose abduction in a deadly June 25 border raid plunged Israeli-Palestinian ties to a new low.
“Abu Mazen (Abbas) should be invited to talks, and I believe the prime minister will do so in the coming days. Negotiations must be launched on the basis of the ‘road map’,” Peres told Israel’s Army Radio, referring to a U.S.-led peace blueprint. “When this (captive) situation is resolved, it (a meeting) will take place,” he said. Diplomacy between Israel and the Palestinians was deadlocked before Shalit’s capture, ever since Hamas Islamists took over the Palestinian Authority in March after defeating Abbas’s more moderate Fatah movement in elections two months earlier. Israel, backed by Western nations, wants Hamas to abandon its charter calling for the Jewish state’s destruction and to renounce violence as a precondition for talks. Abbas argues that he could still be Israel’s interlocutor, circumventing Hamas. An Abbas aide said the president had yet to receive an invitation to hold his first formal summit with Olmert. “They did not contact us over a meeting,” Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters. “We believe that any time Mr. Olmert is ready to meet, the meeting should be very well prepared because what counts should be the substance,” he said. PRISONER SWAP STAKES An Israeli political source said Olmert, who took power in May, has held off on a summit so far because he expects Abbas to demand the release of some of the thousands of Palestinians jailed in Israel. Palestinians estimate the number of prisoners at 10,000. Olmert wants Shalit, whose captors include Hamas militants, to go free before discussing any such amnesty, the source said. Complicating matters for Israel is its parallel efforts to retrieve two soldiers seized by Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas in a July 12 raid also aimed at forcing a prisoner release. Abbas told Bahrain’s Akhbar al-Khaleej newspaper that a swap had been tentatively agreed for Shalit’s release.
“An agreement has been reached about exchanging prisoners that is based on Egypt taking the soldier as a deposit, and after that the number of Palestinian prisoners-of-war would be announced,” Abbas said. Erekat said talk of a deal was “premature”, as did Peres. “Everything that has been published so far is in the realm of speculation. I recommend we be patient. No deal has been sealed,” Peres said But an Israeli security source said that Ofer Dekel, Olmert’s envoy on the hostage crisis, was recently in Cairo to confer with Egyptian officials acting as mediators with Shalit’s captors. There was no immediate comment from Egypt. Israel launched offensives in Gaza and Lebanon following the troop abductions. Around 1,400 Palestinians and Lebanese, most of them civilians, have been killed, as have 158 Israelis. The flare-up in violence, as well as Olmert’s failure to secure the three soldiers’ return, sapped the popularity of his plan to follow up last year’s Israeli withdrawal from Gaza with similar moves in the West Bank, another territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war and where Palestinians seek statehood. Olmert told a parliamentary panel on Monday that his unilateral West Bank “realignment plan” was on hold, stirring speculation that he would seek to engage Abbas in new talks. (Additional reporting by Mohammed Assadi in Ramallah and Miral Fahmy in Dubai) © Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.
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