Israel’s Livni to meet Abbas: Palestinian official

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas
will meet Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni at a Middle East
economic conference in Egypt on Sunday, a Palestinian official
said on Thursday.

An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said Abbas and Livni
would be on joint panel discussion but did not confirm the two
would hold separate talks.

Talks between the two would represent the highest-level
Israeli-Palestinian meeting since the militant Islamist
movement Hamas won a parliamentary election in January,
prompting Israel to shun the Palestinian Authority.

“A meeting between President Abbas and Tzipi Livni has been
arranged for Sunday in Sharm el-Sheikh. The president will
discuss the resumption of the peace process and cooperation,”
senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat told Reuters.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said: “There
is a public session in which she is participating with Mr
Abbas. As to working meetings, we have not yet put out her
schedule.”

The Abbas-Livni meeting would take place ahead of Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert’s first visit to Washington to outline his
plan for the future of the West Bank to President Bush at the
White House on Tuesday. Israeli officials expect Bush to press
Olmert to meet Abbas.

Olmert’s “Convergence Plan” involves withdrawing from
dozens of isolated Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank
while bolstering Jewish settlement blocs in a push to set
Israel’s permanent borders by 2010 with or without Palestinian
agreement.

The newly elected Israeli prime minister said on Wednesday
that he was willing to meet Abbas, a moderate leader, but did
not envisage any progress from such talks unless the Hamas-led
Palestinian government moderated its positions.

Israel, along with much of the rest of the international
community, has demanded that Hamas renounce violence, revoke
its call for the Jewish state’s destruction and embrace a
“roadmap” to peace that charters steps to achieve a final
treaty.

Abbas has repeatedly urged Israel to resume peace
negotiations. The Palestinian leader, who is in the midst of a
power struggle with Hamas, has called on the Islamist movement
to back such talks.

Hamas leaders say negotiations with Israel would be a waste
of time. Although its local leadership, strapped for cash after
losing millions of dollars in international aid, is under
enormous pressure to back Abbas’s peace proposals.