Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat are to hold a summit in Egypt Thursday on a US plan to end three months of bloodshed and forge a lasting Middle East peace deal.
The meeting, hosted by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, is to take place Thursday evening in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, officials from both sides said.
It will be their first face-to-face meeting since the violence erupted in late September, although the two leaders were both in Sharm el-Sheikh in October, when they agreed a truce that ultimately failed to take hold.
More than 350 people have been killed, most of them Palestinians.
News of the summit comes as the two sides ready their responses to a peace plan put forward by outgoing US President Bill Clinton, anxious to clinch a historic Middle East accord before he leaves office on January 20.
But Arafat said the Palestinians were still studying the proposals, and officials said they had reservations on a number of key issues at the heart of the half-century Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"The Palestinian leadership is still studying the American ideas from all angles," Arafat told journalists in Gaza City after prayers for Eid el-Fitr, the feast marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
"The main reservations are on the key issues included in the American proposal, among them Jerusalem, the refugees and the settlements," Palestinian information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo told AFP.
And without giving details, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat told Egyptian national radio the Palestinians want clarification from Washington on US proposals before responding.
"The Palestinian Authority, after it received the US proposals, returned a certain number of questions to Washington", Erakat was quoted by the official Egyptian agency MENA as saying.
The PLO executive committee is due to further deliberate the proposals Wednesday evening, while Barak was hosting a meeting of his security cabinet and was due to convene his "peace cabinet" overnight.
"My mission is to avoid bloodshed," Barak told ministers at the closed-door meeting, Israeli public radio reported.
Sports Minister Matan Vilnai described it as the "final attempt at reconciliation with the Palestinians."
Clinton's proposals reportedly involve Israel turning over control of Arab neighborhoods in occupied east Jerusalem to the Palestinians along with the al-Aqsa mosque compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
The Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, would remain under Israeli sovereignty, according to media reports.
There would be no right of return to Israel for the some 3.7 million refugees made homeless after the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, with only a small number allowed back to Israel for family reunification.
Israel would withdraw from 95 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, territories it has occupied along with east Jerusalem since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. It would annex 80 percent of the Jewish settlements in a land swap.
Israel and the Palestinians had been expected to respond to the Clinton plans on Wednesday, although the White House suggested that the deadline was not set in stone.
A White House official said the president still "ideally" expected to hear from both sides on Wednesday.
"What it is the president put forth ... is essentially a framework on which to build," the official said. "We are waiting for the Palestinians and the Israelis to come back to us on whether they agree on the framework in which to negotiate."
The Sharm el-Sheikh summit will take place exactly three months after the start of the Palestinian uprising against the 33-year Israeli occupation.
In Cairo, the press reported that Mubarak, a key mediator in the Middle East conflict, had been engaged in a round of telephone diplomacy on Tuesday ahead of the summit being announced.
Egypt's official daily Al-Akhbar said he had spoken twice with Barak, and had received calls from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Barak is counting on a peace deal to save his job. A February 6 election pits him against hawkish opposition leader Ariel Sharon, blamed by the Palestinians for triggering the violence with a September 28 visit to al-Aqsa.
Barak has said the election would "take the place of a referendum on peace," while Sharon has vowed he will not be bound by any deal struck by Barak.
Israel's military intelligence chief Amos Malka has warned that there could be an escalation of the violence after the election if there is no deal, but that he believes Arafat aims to reach a deal beforehand, press reports said.
An opinion poll published in the Jerusalem Post shows a narrow majority of 52 percent of Israelis opposed the Clinton proposals, while 38 percent are in favor and 10 percent expressed no opinion -- JERUSALEM (AFP)
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