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Rice to return to Mideast as Gaza withdrawal shaky

Posted on: Friday, 15 July 2005, 14:17 CDT

By Saul Hudson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit the Middle East next week to prod Israel and the Palestinians to stick to the plan for the Jewish state to withdraw from Gaza despite a surge of violence.

The top U.S. diplomat will make her third trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories since February as a 5-month-old truce has apparently collapsed after a suicide bombing and air strikes and rocket attacks in the last few days.

"We're closely engaged with both sides and we encourage them to take appropriate steps to restore order and calm," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters on Friday. "They need to make (a) maximum effort ... both individually and working together, to ensure that this withdrawal is a successful withdrawal."

Rice has said U.S. diplomacy in the region is focused on helping make the scheduled withdrawal of Israeli settlers from occupied Gaza a success as a way to spur peace moves.

Rice, who is expected to arrive in Israel late in the week, spoke with Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz on Friday about the spike in violence following a similar call earlier in the week with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, he said.

Even before this week's violence, the world's major powers had urged the sides to intensify their cooperation over the pullout from the Mediterranean coastal strip because they have hammered out few agreements on how to implement the plan.

One of the worst surges in violence since Israel and the Palestinian Authority declared an end to hostilities in February has raised the possibility of disruptions to Israel's pullout.

On Friday, Israel killed several Hamas gunmen in air strikes in retaliation for a deadly Palestinian rocket attack that followed a Palestinian suicide bombing in an Israeli town earlier in the week.

U.S. PEACEMAKING

Rice's trip is a reflection of intensified U.S. involvement in Middle East peacemaking in President Bush's second term following the death of longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who Washington called an obstacle to peace.

Rice's predecessor, Colin Powell, visited the region just once in his last 20 months in the post.

On her trip that starts on Tuesday, Rice will also make her first visit as secretary of state to Africa, stopping in Senegal, for a regional trade conference, and Sudan, to work with a new government on consolidating peace across the continent's largest country.

In almost six months in her job, Rice has already made repeated trips to Europe, Asia and the Middle East but her senior diplomat for Africa, Connie Newman, dismissed any suggestion that Rice, the first black woman to hold her post, did not consider Africa important.

"They know of her heritage but more importantly they know that she is willing to use her power in their interests," Newman told Reuters.

Source: REUTERS

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