Rice fails to get Middle East peace talks restarted

Israel threatened Gaza with new ground attacks today as a US-led initiative failed to get Palestinian peace talks restarted.

The warning was backed up with further airstrikes aimed at Islamic militants in Gaza who have been targeting Israeli towns with missiles.

And it came as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in the region in the hope of helping restart the stalled Palestinian peace talks.

She was rebuffed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who said the talks could not progress without a truce.

His comments were a disappointment for the United States, which had hoped for a firmer commitment to renew negotiations launched by the Bush administration at a conference in Annapolis.

Ms Rice looked on, lips pursed, at a joint news conference as Mr Abbas called Israel’s action unjustified “under any pretext.”

Earlier, she said that walking away from talks played into the hands of militants, and she blamed Palestinian Hamas radicals for the rocket barrages that provoked the Israeli military onslaught in Gaza .

Mr Abbas’s moderate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank suspended peace talks in protest at the Israeli military offensive that killed more than 100 Palestinians in Gaza.

Israeli aircraft made further attacks on Gaza today after more rockets were fired on the southern town of Sderot.

“The people who are firing rockets do not want peace,” Ms Rice said. “They sow instability, that is what Hamas is doing.”

Ms 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 West to train and develop the Palestinian security forces loyal to Mr Abbas.

“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.

Ms Rice said she still thinks the two sides can reach a deal for Palestinian statehood this year.

The Israeli threat to return to Gaza came from Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

“We cannot afford this kind of extreme Islamic state controlled by Hamas,” she said. Israel evacuated Gaza “not in order to come back, but we might find ourselves in a situation that we have no other alternative,” she added.

Ms Livni did not elaborate, but the ministry later said she was referring to military incursions into the coastal strip.