Rice hopes meetings rebuild peace process

JERUSALEM - The meetings between Israeli and Palestinian leaders announced by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday are intended to be the first step in rebuilding an active peace process, U.S. officials said, although Israeli officials said Rice scaled back a more ambitious agenda after objections from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

The talks, to be held every other week and expected to start April 12, will begin with confidence-building measures such as easing roadblocks on the West Bank. The accord essentially resets the diplomatic calendar to the beginning of the year - before Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas disturbed the Israeli government by agreeing to a power-sharing government with the extremist group Hamas.

Rice said the two men had agreed that the ground-level talks could evolve into detailed discussions on the contours of a Palestinian state. "We're finally opening doors here, not closing them," Rice said at a news conference before flying back to Washington.

Rice has made four trips to the region in four months, but each time has been thwarted in getting the two sides to move substantially beyond incremental issues. Rice has argued that the Palestinians need to know the "political horizon" of a potential state, which is her code for discussing some of the final-status issues blocking a deal, but she has had difficulty overcoming Israeli skepticism.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Rice had signaled that the meetings should cover more than day-to-day issues. "We're hoping we can use this to move forward," he said.

Miri Eisin, Olmert's spokeswoman, said the most contentious subjects, such as the borders of a future Palestinian state, the status of refugees, and Jerusalem would not be discussed in the meetings.

"We may be talking about the political horizon," said Eisin, defining that term as the steps needed before peace negotiations can begin. "But there will not be discussion of final-status issues."

Rice also has exhorted Arab states to reaffirm a five-year-old peace offer that holds the prospect of broad recognition of Israel. She said Arab engagement would make it easier for Israel to consider dramatic steps in talks with the Palestinians.

"Applause at the end of the road will be welcome," Rice said, "but help now in moving down that road is far more important." The Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab "paths do not substitute for one another; they reinforce one another," she added.

Before leaving Washington, Rice had said she wanted to set up a parallel negotiating track that began to deal with the main issues thwarting the establishment of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. "My primary goal is to establish a mechanism, a common approach, that I can use with them in parallel so that we are addressing the same issues," Rice said Friday. "That's really the key right now."

But that idea largely faded after Rice held her first meeting with Olmert over dinner Sunday, U.S. and Israeli officials said. Israeli officials said Olmert had problems with the "parallel" format and also balked at the scope of the issues Rice wanted to raise. He refused to put on the table the core issues of the conflict, such as borders, Jerusalem, and the settlement of refugees.

During the meal, Olmert agreed to meet every other week with Abbas. Olmert has met with Abbas once since the Palestinian power-sharing government was formed earlier this month.

Still, the mood has been sour between the two men since Abbas agreed to let his Fatah party join the Palestinian cabinet, headed by a Hamas prime minister. Abbas said he reached the accord largely to end violence between the two factions.

A huge sewage reservoir in the northern Gaza Strip collapsed yesterday, killing five people in a frothing cascade of waste and mud that swamped a village and showed the desperate need to boost Gaza's infrastructure.

Rescue crews and Hamas gunmen rushed to the area to search for people feared buried under the sewage and mud. Dressed in wetsuits, they paddled boats through the layer of foam floating on the green and brown rivers of waste.

The existing treatment plant

in northern Gaza - just a few hundred yards from the border with Israel - stores waste in seven holding basins. With

the burgeoning population producing nearly four times

as much waste as the plant could treat, officials have put overflow sewage in the nearby dunes, creating a lake covering nearly 110 acres,

the United Nations said.

Yesterday morning, an embankment around one

of the seven basins collapsed, sending a wall

of sewage crashing into the village of Umm Naser.

The wave killed two women in their 70s, two toddlers, and a teenage girl, and injured 35 people, hospital officials said. More than 200 homes were destroyed, officials said.

- Associated Press

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