Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called off a meeting with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert scheduled for Thursday, with an aide saying Wednesday he saw no point in such a parley if Israel did not want to discuss a possible renewal of peace negotiations, according to dpa. Israel also did not meet his demands to expand a shattered Gaza ceasefire to the West Bank, release frozen Palestinian tax revenues, free some 40 jailed senior Hamas politicians and allow Palestinians to start work on a Gaza harbour, Foreign Minister Ziad Abu Amr said. "Because Israel did not respond to these demands during the preliminary meetings between the delegations, the president has decided not to hold the meeting," Abu Amr told reporters, adding they included "an Israeli commitment to a political horizon." The meeting had been expected to take place Thursday in Jericho and would have been the first held in a West Bank city in years. David Baker, a senior adviser to Olmert, said it had been postponed indefinitely at a Palestinian request. "The prime minister is always ready to meet with Mahmoud Abbas," he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. The Israeli and Palestinian leaders have not met since April 15, despite a pledge to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who visited the region one month earlier to hold bi-weekly meetings. Olmert has said repeatedly that he is willing to hold regular, bilateral talks with Abbas, but wants them to focus on daily issues such as security issues and improving Palestinian living conditions. He has said he sees no point in reviving long-stalled, actual peace negotiations with a "weak" president bound by a unity government led by the radical Islamic Hamas movement which refuses to acknowledge Israel's right to exist and renounce violence. Nevertheless, Amr said, the so-called peace quartet - the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations - intends inviting both Abbas and Olmert to attend a meeting of its members slated to take place in Cairo on June 25. "I have asked (EU foreign policy chief) Javier Solana to come to the region and meet with both leaders to make the quartet meeting successful," said Abu Amr, who earlier met European diplomats and urged them to pressure Israel to release withheld Palestinian revenues. According to Amr, Israel is withholding more than 700 million US dollars in custom duties which it collects on behalf of the Palestinians on goods imported via its air- and seaports. Israel stopped transferring the revenues shortly after Hamas won January 2005 legislative elections, citing concern the money would end up in the hands of militants involved in attacks against it. Olmert, meanwhile, said Israel is willing to discuss a 2002 Arab peace initiative in an "open and sincere" manner, but not in the form of an ultimatum. "Working with our Jordanian and Egyptian partners and hopefully other Arab states, we must pursue a comprehensive peace with energy and vision," Olmert said in a piece published in the British Guardian daily Wednesday to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War, which saw Israel capture the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. The 2002 peace plan, also known as the Saudi initiative after its main sponsor, proposes full recognition of Israel in exchange for a withdrawal from the territories captured in the 1967 war, and a solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees from 1948 and their descendants. Writing in a piece published side-by-side with Olmert's, Palestinian Premier Ismail Haniya called on Western countries to end a crippling economic and diplomatic boycott imposed on the Palestinian government because of the refusal of Haniya's Hamas movement to accept Israel's right to exist. "There can be no exit from the impasse without (the) sanctions being lifted and Israel's release of the hundreds of millions of dollars of our money it has seized," he said. Also Wednesday, Israeli troops killed two Palestinians in separate incidents in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israeli aircraft filed a missile at two Hamas militants as they were planting a bomb near an Israeli ground force in the northern Gaza Strip before dawn, killing one and seriously injuring the other. Earlier, Israeli soldiers shot dead a 68-year-old Palestinian and injured his wife and two sons in an arrest raid in the southern West Bank city of Hebron. The wife was shot in the head and in a serious condition, hospital officials said. Soldiers entered Yehya Jabari's house seeking wanted militants in the area, but were confronted by angry family members who threw objects at them, including a gas balloon, an army spokeswoman said. One of them shot Jabari as he grabbed the soldier's rifle, trying to get hold of it and tearing its strap, she said.
