Saudi asks Israel to halt work on security barrier

NEW YORK: Saudi Arabia's foreign minister says that Israel should stop work on a security barrier in and along the West Bank and halt settlement activity there as a good-will gesture to assure Arab states that it is serious about comprehensive peace talks.

The minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, stopped short Wednesday of making his demand a condition for Arab attendance at a planned Middle East peace conference in Washington. And he said that in recent days he had become encouraged about the prospects for the conference, which the United States is to sponsor in November. But he would not promise that Saudi Arabia would attend, a major Israeli objective.

His comments, which came after a meeting between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and top officials from the Gulf Arab states on the outskirts of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, forecast the tough road ahead for the Bush administration in trying to forge a comprehensive Middle East peace in the last months of President George W. Bush's term.

Saudi Arabia and Washington's other Arab allies have insisted that the conference tackle the so-called final status issues that have bedeviled negotiators since 1979.

They include the status of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees who fled their homes or were forced out, the dismantling of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and the borders of an eventual Palestinian state.

Bush administration officials say that they are also pushing Israel hard to put the big issues on the table, but they acknowledge that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert needs something in return: Arab, and especially Saudi, diplomatic recognition of Israel.

At a briefing for reporters Wednesday, Faisal raised another potentially sticky issue for the Bush administration as it seeks progress on a peace proposal: the Islamic group Hamas, which the United States and Israel view as a terrorist organization but which controls the Gaza Strip, home to 1.4 million Palestinians.

After Hamas's takeover of Gaza, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, kicked Hamas out of the national unity government that it formed in February with Abbas's Fatah faction. The ejection was applauded by the United States and Israel, which have refused to deal with Hamas.

But Faisal said that for any peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians to work, Hamas must be brought into another national unity government with Fatah. He said that if the international community had accepted the Palestinian national unity government in February, when Saudi Arabia brokered an accord establishing the government, Hamas might have eventually renounced violence against Israel. He called that "water under the bridge now" but added that Saudi Arabia still wanted to establish another national unity government between Hamas and Fatah.

But compromise on Hamas is not likely from the Bush administration, which has characterized the battle against the group as a fight between moderates and extremists.

By Helene Cooper, Published: September 27, 2007