Israel Foreign Minister offers to move on road map

Israel’s foreign minister offered peace talks to the Palestinians and Syria if they moved against violence, endorsing the US-backed “road map” peace plan again after a year of going it alone.

British Foreign minister Silvan Shalom’s speech at an annual conference in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, marked the first time an Israeli official actively endorsed the road map since Ariel Sharon put forward his plan to pull Israeli settlements out of the Gaza Strip and a small part of the West Bank.