Rice mediates shaky Israeli-Palestinian truce

With less than a month to go before Israel plans its historic withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she will talk to both Israeli and Palestinian leaders about preserving hopes for peace and stability.

Rice yesterday began a long weekend of talks aimed at rescuing a shaky Israeli-Palestinian truce. Her visit was arranged hastily, as violence and protests escalated over the planned mid-August pullout.

“This is a critical time in the history of this region,” Rice said before meetings with Israel’s foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, and Dov Weisglass, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Rice was seeing Sharon today and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas tomorrow. Her schedule was left loose so she can shuttle between the leaders with last-minute concerns.

Although Rice has repeatedly said the US will take a back seat to Israel and the Palestinians as they work out their differences, her trip was a sign that she will pressure both sides to keep working.

The trip is Rice’s third to Jerusalem and the West Bank since she took over as the top US diplomat in January. True peace between autonomous Israeli and Palestinian states is probably years off, but the Bush administration has pledged to help both sides take the early steps.

Anti-Israeli violence and terror attacks on one side and bitter opposition to the pullout among devout settlers has complicated the Gaza pullout, although leaders on both sides say they remain committed to it.

The Gaza plan will see Israeli troops and Jewish settlers leave the impoverished seaside land on Israel’s western flank.

The land would then be controlled entirely by Palestinians, who also control much of the larger West Bank. The two territories would form a future Palestinian state.

::Jewish athletes from 64 countries took places of honour in an ancient amphitheatre in the shadow of Jerusalem’s Old City walls amid tight security yesterday for the closing ceremony of the Maccabiah Games, known as the Jewish Olympics.

Thousands of armed police deployed to guard the festive ceremony, closing roads around the 500-year-old Sultan’s Pool for fear of violence by Palestinian militants or attacks on Israeli VIPs by Jewish extremists opposed to the government’s planned removal of Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank.

Organisers said the participation of 7,700 athletes in the 17th Maccabiah Games made it the biggest yet in the series, begun in 1932 in what was then British-ruled Palestine.

The last games, in 2001, held at the height of Israeli-Palestinian violence, were cut short, and only some 2,000 athletes braved the trip then.