U.S. pushes for Israeli-Palestinian discussions

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The United States said on Monday it would make a new push for Israeli-Palestinian talks and U.S. envoy George Mitchell, en route to the region, hoped to lay the groundwork.

"The president has told me to exert all efforts to create the circumstance when the parties can begin immediate discussions," Mitchell told reporters at a Palestinian donors' conference in Oslo, referring to renewed negotiations that President Barack Obama has pledged to pursue.

In the Gaza Strip, militants opposed to a dialogue tried to blast open Israel's border fence.

Israeli forces killed three Palestinian militants who had planned to breach the border fence with the Hamas-run territory by detonating explosives they had tied to five horses, a military spokesman said.

Middle East envoy Tony Blair said after the Oslo meeting that Obama's push for a peace deal should be embraced by Arab states.

"For the Arab countries in particular we need their support...," Blair said. "We need their support for the Palestinian Authority, their support for the peace process, their support in coming to a new ... understanding about how we can establish peace in the Middle East.

"President Obama needs something to come back to him. He's reaching out but he needs people to reach back and I think the next few months is all about seeing whether we can create the circumstances where that happens," he told Reuters.

POLICY SPEECH

Mitchell was to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday.

Netanyahu is at odds with Obama over the president's demand to halt Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and has not endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state, a cornerstone of U.S. Middle East policy.

Obama spoke to Netanyahu by phone on Monday and the White House said the president "reiterated the principal elements of his Cairo speech, including his commitment to Israel's security." Obama also used last week's Cairo address to the Muslim world to press Israel for a settlements freeze.

Netanyahu is to make a major policy speech on Sunday in which a senior official said the Israeli leader would "articulate his vision on how to move forward in the peace process with the Palestinians and with the larger Arab world."

Obama told Netanyahu he looked forward to hearing his views on peace and security in the speech, the White House said.

Netanyahu has said he is ready to meet Abbas and begin talks on economic, security and political issues, which he has not specified.

Palestinians have rejected his proposed shift of focus away from territorial issues, whose complexity, Netanyahu has said, has frustrated U.S.-backed attempts to reach a final peace deal.

Abbas said renewed talks would be pointless unless Netanyahu first stopped settlement activity and endorsed Palestinian statehood as part of a 2003 peace "road map" that also calls on the Palestinian Authority to crack down on militants.

"If Israel rejects this and rejects the two-state solution, then, what shall we negotiate?" Abbas asked during a visit to a school in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

GAZA VIOLENCE

Palestinians said militants fired anti-tank weapons at Israeli soldiers along the Gaza Strip frontier and set off explosives. No Israelis were injured in the attack, the military spokesman said.

Israeli infantry, tanks and combat helicopters fired at the gunmen and several of the horses were killed, the spokesman said. A Hamas radio station said at least 10 fighters took part in the assault, the most ambitious since Israel ended a three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip on January 18.

Hamas, an Islamist group that opposes Washington's peace efforts, violently took control of the enclave in 2007 after routing rival Fatah forces loyal to Abbas, who now governs only in the West Bank.

The border attack could make it more difficult for Netanyahu, who heads a right-leaning government and takes a strong line on security, to meet U.S. requests to ease a Gaza blockade and allow in reconstruction material and other goods to ease Palestinian hardship.

(Additional reporting by Adam Entous and Joseph Nasr in Jerusalem, Wojciech Moskwa in Oslo and Ali Sawafta in Ramallah; Editing by Janet Lawrence)