The United States special envoy to the Middle East made a stop in Egypt on Sunday in an effort to ensure peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis would continue. After meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the situation was not inspiring, telling reporters that he is facing “difficulties and obstacles” in Washington’s efforts to keep talks alive.
“We knew when we began these efforts that there would be a lot of difficulties and obstacles, and there have been,” George Mitchell said, after his meeting with the Egyptian president in Cairo.
“Despite their differences, both the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority asked us to continue these discussions in efforts to establish the conditions under which they could continue direct negotiations,” said Mitchell.
Although Palestinian officials said over the weekend that unless there is another freeze in settlement construction, peace talks should be ended, Mitchell said that neither side was ready to give up on the negotiations.
Mitchell had been in Ramallah last week, where he met with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, where he was meet with support from the PLO for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to end talks.
The PLO said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bore full responsibility for the collapse of the talks, given his refusal to extend the temporary freeze on settlement construction in the face of both US and international pressure to do so and threats by Abbas that he would pull out of the talks if expansion continued.
“People need to understand that this problem of settlement expansion is not a Palestinian issue or something we have control of,” Rashid Abdellah, a former PLO negotiator, told Bikya Masr in Washington.
Back in Cairo, an unnamed Hamas official went a step further, telling Bikya Masr that “Israel’s actions continue to define the peace process and it is becoming obvious that they do not want or will not have peace.”
The official, who asked not to be named, said that “Israel is a rogue state and is very dangerous because it somehow is outside the oversight that so many other countries are put under.”
Mitchell is working around the clock to meet with Middle East leaders in the hope that they can persuade the Palestinian leadership to continue talks with Israel, despite the Jewish state’s refusal to extend a 10-month moratorium on settlement expansion in the West Bank that ended a week ago.
Mitchell met with leaders in Qatar on Saturday before flying to Cairo, where he initially held talks with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and intelligence chief Omar Suleiman.
Mitchell then met with Arab League leader Amr Moussa on Saturday night, days before the league’s member states are expected to show support for Abbas’ withdrawal from the direct talks during a meeting in Cairo.
The envoy was to be in Amman on Sunday evening to meet with Jordanian King Abdullah.
** Bikya Masr staff in Cairo contributed to this report.