A Palestinian senior official said President Abbas informed US Secretary of State Rice on the progress achieved with Israeli PM Olmert and that both leaders will meet once again later this month and that they agreed on broad principles such as making the city of Jerusalem the capital of the two states but will delay the talks on the practical matters until after negotiations. Assistants to President Abbas said Rice informed Abbas that Washington intends to invite six countries, including Syria, to the Middle East peace conference. Nimer Hammad, adviser to President Abbas, said Washington would like to see Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to participate in addition to the PA in the conference to be sponsored by the United States next November. Hammad told Reuters that Rice informed President Abbas that the United States intends to invite the Arab countries commissioned by the Arab League to follow up the Arab Peace Initiative, and this means Syria and Lebanon. A leading adviser to President Abbas said: We hope we can achieve adequate progress before the conference so that we can encourage the Arab countries to attend.

In the meantime, US Secretary of State Rice it is better to describe the document that both Palestinian and Israeli sides are working on drafting now as a "joint statement", pointing out that the Palestinian and Israeli negotiating teams are working on drafting in writing the understandings reached between President Abbas and Israeli PM Olmert in their bilateral talks in the past weeks, but stressed that the document will not include any timetables. On the document that they are working on, she said: I believe that it is best to describe it as a joint statement; I don’t want to give it a name because I believe that the Palestinians and Israelis will name it at some point but really what they are trying to do is tackled the issues that have been discussed in the bilateral talks between Abbas and Olmert meaning to record the understandings reached and that will be reached, and it is clear that they are handling the core issues pertaining to the establishment of a Palestinian state. She told the reporters: I believe there will be several sessions between the Palestinian and Israeli negotiating teams to determine the features of this document, and I expect that after doing this and after they get a chance to hold a series of sessions, it will be appropriate to travel there and see if there is anything useful that we can do. Rice said it is not wise to talk about a timetable at this phase. She said: I believe it is not wise to have a timetable at this phase. I don’t really expect the document to include a timetable; I don’t believe that this is the intention but if they are able to agree on this, this will be good, but I don’t expect this. On the final status issues that President Abbas mentioned in front of Rice which are Jerusalem, the borders, the refugees, the settlements and the water, Rice said: everybody knows that there is a set of issues that need to be solved if the Palestinian state is to be established and these are not the only issues that need to be solved, there is also the issue of security that needs a solution and there is a need for a security concept to be workable for the new Palestinian state and Israel and the neighbours of the Palestinians such as the borders of Egypt with Gaza. There is also a need for understandings on the economic relations and the natural resources and there are many issues that need to be solved. Rice stressed that she does not want to leave an impression that the roadmap has been pushed aside. She said: I believe that it will remain to be the guide for many of the commitments that need to be honoured and I believe that both sides understand this very well. I will not say that the roadmap has failed, no, it still exists and one of the matters that I talked about with both sides was that there is a set of commitments in the roadmap, especially in the first phase, that need to be implemented if the Palestinian state is to ever succeed. There is a need to deal with the Israeli settlements and deal with dismantling the terrorism infrastructure, so the roadmap remains to be a set of guiding principles that will lead us at the end of the day to a Palestinian state. Rice pointed out that there is currently a process of bilateral talks on building confidence between the two leaders: Olmert and Abbas, and everyone is now talking about the excellent atmosphere between them and I believe that they show some kind of confidence and I believe that the government of Fayyad shows that it intends to work on implementing some of the commitments mentioned in the roadmap, such as what the government did in terms of closing down some charitable organizations that were used for financing terrorism. She pointed out that declaring the international meeting in the fall this year assisted in pushing some to move forward. The United States is interested to plan for the meeting in consultation with the people around on how to make the meeting succeed because all of this must lead to a set of steps that can take the parties closer to negotiations over a Palestinian state.

In the meantime, Palestinian officials said the corridors of the UN where President Abbas headed to will be witnessing this week intensive diplomatic activities as the margins of the UN General Assembly meetings will witness a meeting of the Quartet Committee and another meeting for the Committee Coordinating the assistance from the donors' countries and a meeting between President Abbas and the accompanying delegation with US President Bush tomorrow, Monday. The Palestinian delegation includes PM Salam Fayyad and Ahmad Qurei', Head of the Palestinian negotiating team, and Yasser Abed Rabbo, Secretary of PLO Executive Committee, and Riyad al-Malki, Foreign Affairs and Information Minister, and Dr. Samir Abdallah, Minister of Planning. Today will be a day full of meetings. The Quartet Committee will convene today at the ministerial level and will listen to a report from the Quartet Envoy Tony Blair on his plan to assist the Palestinians in achieving economic development and building the Palestinian state institutions according to the tasks set to him by the Quartet Committee, which are economic tasks and not political ones. Later today, the Quartet Committee will meet on an Iftar Banquet with the Arab Committee commissioned to follow up the Arab Peace Initiative to hold consultations on how to push the peace process forward. Israeli PM Olmert will not attend the UN meetings. Israeli FM Livni will represent Israel in the meetings and she said that she hopes to meet with representatives of several Arab countries that have no official diplomatic ties with Israel at the margins of the UN General Assembly meetings.

On September 24, a meeting of the Committee Coordinating assistance of the donors' countries headed by Norway and the meeting will listen to a report from the World Bank on the economic conditions in the Palestinian lands and what is needed to achieve development. The meeting will also listen to a report by Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad on the middle term Palestinian development and reform plan and what is needed to achieve real development in the Palestinian lands. No declaration on assistance to the Palestinian people will be announced in the meeting as the countries to attend the meeting will be asked to declare their financial pledges in a meeting to be held in December in New York to be devoted to declare the financial assistance.

Published at Al Hayat al Jadida an Al Ayyam NewsPapers on September 23, 2007