Mideast peacemakers appealed Tuesday for urgent, significant progress in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations as conditions on the ground deteriorated and the two sides bickered at an international conference. With time running out for an agreement on at least the outlines of a settlement by a year-end target, diplomats from the “quartet” – the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia – said rapid action was now critical to meeting the deadline. There is an “urgent need for tangible progress towards the shared goal of an agreement by the end of 2008,” the group said, restating its commitment to the goal that was set at the US-hosted peace gathering in Annapolis, Maryland, in November. Since Annapolis, Israeli and Palestinian officials have held numerous rounds of talks. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has six times shuttled between Washington and the Middle East to push the process forward, but there has been little apparent movement. Israel, which is in the throes of a political crisis, has continued to announce new settlement projects in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, drawing Palestinian condemnation. As the quartet was meeting in the German capital on Tuesday, a less-than-week-old truce between Israel and Palestinian militants in control of Gaza was broken when members of Islamic Jihad launched rockets into southern Israel to retaliate for an Israeli raid in the West Bank.
