Agence France-Presse,
RAMALLAH, West Bank: US President George W. Bush heads to the occupied West Bank on Thursday on only the second visit by a US head of state to the Palestinian territory as he pressed his mission to secure a Middle East peace deal by the end of this year.
After talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday, Bush said that he was “very hopeful” that a deal could be reached before his term of office ends next January.
But now he must win over a Palestinian leadership deeply sceptical about the sincerity of the Israeli government in working towards a just and lasting peace.
Hours ahead of Bush's arrival, a massive security operation gripped the city of Ramallah where he was to meet Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
The US president was due to fly into Abbas's leadership compound by helicopter without venturing on to Ramallah's streets.
But eager to prove their security credentials, the Palestinians deployed 4,000 personnel across the city and imposed a virtual curfew in a bid to prevent any incident marring a visit that is only the second by a US president after Bill Clinton's in 1998.
The Palestinians made clear ahead of the meeting that they wanted US assurances that Israel was finally prepared to halt the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories following the relaunch of peace negotiations in the United States six weeks ago.
Two announcements of new construction have already overshadowed the renewed talks.
“We are expecting that President Bush will get Israel to freeze settlement activity and that he will insist on the need to put an end to the Israeli occupation so as to lead to the creation of two states in line with his vision,” Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina said.
But after his talks with Bush on Wednesday, the Israeli premier made plain that he was unwilling to give any undertaking on settlement expansion in annexed Arab east Jerusalem and was only willing to countenance a freeze in other parts of the West Bank.
“We are not going to build new settlements or expropriate land in the territories,” Olmert said. But “Jerusalem, as far as we are concerned, is not in the same status.”
Both Olmert and Bush also said they expected a commitment from the Palestinians to stop violence against Israel, including rocket fire from Gaza, even though the territory has been beyond the control of Abbas's leadership since the Islamist Hamas movement seized it last June.
“As to the rockets my first question is going to be to president Abbas is what do you intend to do about them,” Bush said.
Olmert stressed that as far as Israel was concerned there needed to be an end to the rocket fire from Gaza for there to be a serious chance of a peace deal with Abbas.
“Gaza must be part of the package and as long as there will be terror from Gaza it will be very, very hard to reach any peaceful understanding between us and the Palestinians,” he said.
But Abbas's lack of control in Gaza was underlined on Wednesday when thousands of Hamas supporters joined a mass rally against Bush's visit, branding the US president the “butcher of the world” and brandishing pictures of him with blood dripping from his mouth.
Washington, like Israel, brands Hamas a terror group and has sidelined the Islamist movement while seeking to bolster the moderate Abbas after boycotting his predecessor the late Yasser Arafat for years.
In a break with protocol, Bush was set to continue his boycott of Arafat even in death, eschewing the tour of the late leader's mausoleum inside Abbas's compound that is usually expected of visiting dignitaries, diplomatic sources said.
Israel has intensified its military operations in Gaza since the revival of peace talks in November, killing around 100 people, most of them Palestinian militants.
Israel has also carried out a flurry of operations in the occupied West Bank, drawing criticism from Abbas's leadership which insists that it is trying to provide security in the territory in line with its peace commitments.
On Monday, Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad protested that Israeli incursions, including a three-day operation in the city of Nablus last week, were “sabotaging” the efforts of the Palestinian security forces.
But Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni countered that Israel had no intention of halting its operations against militants “even during peace negotiations with the Palestinians.”
