Neighboring powers to meet with Abbas

JERUSALEM -- Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority president, will meet in Egypt on Monday for talks with two neighboring Arab leaders alarmed by Hamas's takeover of the Gaza Strip.

The meeting will be hosted by President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and attended by King Abdullah II of Jordan in the Sinai resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Israeli and Palestinian officials said yesterday. Hamas leaders will be excluded from the four-way meeting, which is designed to show Arab and Israeli support for Abbas, a leader of the secular Fatah party, and other moderate Palestinians now running a government in the West Bank that has no apparent authority in Gaza.

The political separation of Gaza, an impoverished coastal strip that borders Egypt, from the West Bank, a more prosperous territory adjacent to Jordan, has troubled the leaders of the two neighbors -- the only Arab countries that have peace agreements with Israel -- over the potential consequences of instability on their borders.

Egypt's invitation represents a particular rebuke to Hamas, formally known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, whose government in Gaza has not been recognized by any foreign country. Mubarak sponsored the military training of hundreds of Fatah forces loyal to Abbas this year under a program now supported by a $40 million US aid package.

Mubarak's intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, also spent months as the primary mediator between the Palestinian parties, only to see Hamas fighters fire on the Egyptian diplomatic mission in Gaza during their takeover. Egypt has since transferred its ambassador to the Palestinian Authority to the West Bank, withdrawn its security delegation from Gaza, and effectively sealed its border with the strip.

Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, a 79-year-old Islamic political movement that constitutes Mubarak's chief opposition. Israeli analysts say Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood operate independently, but Arab analysts warn that Mubarak must be careful not to inflame Islamic activists in his own country as he deals with Hamas.

"He's worried about his regime -- he doesn't like the Islamists, period," said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian sociologist and democracy activist. "He can't try a moderate approach to Hamas when he also doesn't with his own Islamist problem."

Mubarak's most pressing short-term concern is Egypt's border with Gaza, a stretch of about 8 miles that was patrolled by Israeli forces until they withdrew from Gaza in the fall of 2005. Egypt is limited in how many troops it can deploy along the frontier, a prime weapons-smuggling route into Gaza, under the terms of the 1978 Camp David peace accords with Israel.

In the past, Palestinians in Gaza, hemmed in by Israeli-controlled passages and security, have pushed over the barrier and flooded into the Sinai by the thousands. Another such exodus could be far larger and more chaotic, Israeli and Palestinian analysts say, if humanitarian conditions continue to deteriorate for the 1.4 million Palestinians who live in the strip.

Jordan's Abdullah also faces a potential problem arising from Gaza's separation from the West Bank. Some Israeli leaders have said that Jordan, most of whose residents are of Palestinian descent, should become the Palestinian state.

In the week since Hamas seized control of Gaza, Israeli officials have called for Jordan to consider a "confederation" with parts of the West Bank. Jordan's Hashemite royal family, destabilized in the past by Palestinian political groups, has long dismissed the idea.

Olmert has called Abbas's break with Hamas, an armed movement that does not recognize Israel's right to exist, a new opportunity to begin negotiations toward the creation of a Palestinian state.

"We will ask the Israelis to immediately resume talks on a final-status agreement and end the occupation," said Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior adviser to Abbas.

Abed Rabbo said Abbas will also ask Olmert to remove some of the hundreds of Israeli roadblocks and barriers in the West Bank, which the Israeli military says it maintains for security. He said doing so would "make Palestinian life more normal" and allow Fatah security forces greater freedom of movement.

Abbas dissolved the Hamas-led unity power-sharing government June 14 after the Islamic group completed a five-day rout of Fatah security forces in Gaza that left more than 140 people dead. He appears unwilling to reconcile with Hamas any time soon.