Abbas tells Olmert to change policies to achieve peace

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas today said the results of the Israeli election would have little effect unless the winner, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, changed his policies.

“The results do not change anything unless Olmert changes his agenda and gives up his unilateral ideas,” Abbas said on the sidelines of an Arab summit in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital.

Abbas, however, said it appears from results so far that Olmert would be able to “comfortably” form the next Israeli government.

In separate comments made just before his departure from Khartoum, Abbas repeated his rejection of any unilateral Israeli actions.

“We want negotiations and not to dictate unilateral solutions,” he said.

With 99.7% of polling stations accounted for, Olmert’s centrist Kadima party was winning 28 of 120 seats, the Israeli Election Commission reported early today, enough to form a ruling coalition in parliament.

Olmert, in declaring victory, said he was ready for new peace talks and to make painful compromises such as uprooting some Jewish settlements in the West Bank and allowing Palestinians to have a state.

But he demanded that the Palestinians be willing to compromise in return and has claimed a mandate to withdraw unilaterally from much of the West Bank as well as define Israel’s borders, which he has said he will do by 2010.

Allies of Abbas, a moderate, called for the immediate resumption of talks on the internationally backed “road map” peace plan.

The road map plan – drawn up by the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations – envisages a Palestinian state and an Israeli state living in peace with each other.