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Israeli FM in Egypt for talks
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ISRAELI Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, meeting with Egyptian and Jordanian leaders on Sunday, will offer a frame of "staged progress toward a final agreement" to the Palestinians for resuming their peace talks, Israel's Ha'aretz daily reported on Sunday.
Peres's proposal is Israel's core response to a peace plan jointly prepared by Egypt and Jordan earlier this month for ending the seven-month-old Israeli-Palestinian violence and restarting the talks between the two sides, according to the report.
It was obviously a compromise between the Palestinians' demand to hold final-agreement talks from the point they broke off and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's insistence on a long-term interim and non-belligerency deal with the Palestinians.
According to the Peres' idea, the seeking of a final deal between the two sides would not be an all-or-nothing move as during the administration of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was trounced by Sharon in last February's general elections.
Peres believes that a final accord should be reached after a series of agreements that would "integrate elements of confidence-building measures with elements of the final agreement," according to the report.
Peres and Sharon met twice over the weekend to co-ordinate their stands on the Egyptian-Jordanian initiative, which Peres will discuss with Egyptian and Jordanian leaders on Sunday.
The initiative urges both the Palestinians and Israel to firstly take measures to reduce the violence on the ground, and then to adopt confidence-building steps before resuming their peace talks from the point they broke off.
Peres has arrived in Cairo and begun his talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Meanwhile, Israeli and Palestinian security officials are scheduled to meet again on Sunday despite a weekend of escalating violence between the two sides, an official at Israeli prime minister's office said.
Later in the day, the foreign minister will travel to the Jordanian Red Sea resort of Aqaba to meet Jordanian King Abdullah Bin Hussein there.
After the talks, Peres will return to Israel to hold another meeting with Sharon before heading to Washington for talks with US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The visit — the first by a senior Israeli official to Egypt since right-winger Ariel Sharon became Israel's prime minister last month — is going ahead despite a flare-up in violence at the weekend.
On Saturday, a Palestinian and an Israeli were killed in separate shooting incidents and five Jewish settlers were hurt in a Palestinian mortar attack in the Gaza Strip.(SD-Xinhua)
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