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Good morning everyone.

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Rice: Mideast talks should resume quick

By ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer 3 minutes ago

CAIRO, Egypt - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday she will work toward resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations as soon as possible, saying Hamas is trying to wreck chances for the peace process.

Rice made the comments after talks with Egyptian officials in Cairo on a stopover before heading to Israel, trying to rescue peace talks after an Israeli military offensive that killed more than 100 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Israel launched the offensive to stop rocket attacks by the Hamas militant groups on nearby Israeli cities, but the assault prompted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to suspend negotiations.

“There has to be an active peace process that can withstand the efforts of rejectionists to keep peace from being made, the people who are firing rockets do not want peace,” Rice told reporters in Cairo. “They sow instability, that is what Hamas is doing.”

Rice backed Israel’s right to respond to the rocket fire, but said it must avoid causing civilian casualties.

“The rocket attacks against innocent Israelis in their cities need to stop. This can’t go on. No Israeli government can tolerate that,” she said. But the Israelis “need to be aware of the effects of these operations on innocent people.”

She said Hamas, which took over the Gaza Strip last July, is armed “in part” by Iran and underlined the need for the United States and the West to train and develop the Palestinian security forces loyal to Abbas, whose government controls the West Bank.

“Hamas gets armed by the Iranians and if nobody helps to improve the security capabilities of the legitimate Palestinian Authority security forces. That’s not a very good situation,” she said at a news conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit.

On her way to the Middle East, Rice said she still thinks the two sides can reach a deal for Palestinian statehood this year.

“I do think that negotiations ought to resume as soon as possible,” Rice told reporters on her plane. “I understand that the situation has been complicated. But the longer the negotiations are not ongoing or the longer that they are suspended, if that’s what one wants to call it, the more it is a victory for those who don’t want to see a two-state solution.”

Rice declined to call for a cease-fire, which many Israelis think would legitimize Hamas and its hold in Gaza. The Mediterranean coastal strip is the smaller, poorer of two Arab tracts that would form an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Egypt’s Aboul Gheit, whose country has sought to isolate Hamas, also stopped short of calling for a cease-fire. He said Egypt was seeking to convince Israel “not to resort to excessive use of force.... The imbalance of power (between Hamas and the Israelis) must be taken into account.” He said Egypt also urges the Palestinians to halt rocket fire.

Israel said it wants to continue negotiations, but suggested it also may launch a full-scale re-invasion of the Gaza territory it abandoned three years ago in a first step toward ending defensive occupation of lands the Palestinians claim for the state.

The goal of two side-by-side states anytime soon has looked far from reach in recent days as an Israeli civilian died from militant rocket fire and more than 100 Palestinians died in the Israeli offensive. Violence and protests spilled over from Gaza to the larger, more stable West Bank, where Rice was due later Tuesday.

The moderate U.S.-backed Palestinian leadership in the West Bank suspended peace talks in protest, and gave no date for return. That made restoring two-way talks Rice’s chief objective for a trip she had planned to check up on the negotiators’ progress.

In Egypt, Rice asked President Hosni Mubarak and other officials for help controlling Gaza’s small border with Egypt, site of a border breach in January that became something of a public relations coup for Hamas. Some Israeli military analysts think the more sophisticated longer-range rockets fired at the Israeli city of Ashkelon in recent days probably came into Gaza during the week that fences with Egypt were down.

Rice was also looking for ways to speed aid into Gaza, sealed off for months as Israel tries to punish Hamas and break its rule. She said proposals from Egypt and the Palestinians to reopen a monitored border crossing point have merit.

Gaza and the Palestinian leadership split that underlies the crisis are the largest potential deal-killers for Bush’s goal to sign a peace treaty before the close of his term in January. The crisis comes on top of the usual list of obstacles that have spiked previous peace attempts.

Photographs of dead and injured Palestinian children blanketed Arab media on Sunday and Monday amid stern international warnings to Israel to avoid what Palestinians and others say is the indiscriminate killing of civilians. Israel pulled its forces out of the territory Monday even as Israel’s defense chief warned that a larger assault may be in the offing.

Arab outrage over Israel’s offensive in Gaza threatened to swamp what promise remained in the peace framework that Bush launched with international backing last fall. The talks have featured regular secret meetings between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators but no public breakthroughs. Israeli housing activity, Palestinian militant violence and police inaction already had undermined confidence on both sides following the celebratory mood of Bush’s November peace conference at Annapolis, Md

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080304/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_mideast

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Everyone should feel much better now - ooooh boy.