Rice Announces 3-Way Talks on Palestinian State

Rice hopes to use the prospect of renewed U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process to help win Arab support for the Iraqi government and a campaign to combat the rising influence of Iran. She is to meet with Persian Gulf foreign ministers in Kuwait City on Tuesday.

Both Olmert and Abbas are politically weakened, making prospects slim for the success of their talks. Olmert's approval rating is 14 percent, and Abbas is struggling against the Hamas-led government.

Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, said the planned meeting was "against our Palestinian unity."

"Up to now we have heard nothing about our rights or about breaking the international siege against our Palestinian government," Barhoum said, referring to the international aid embargo imposed on the Palestinian Authority after Hamas unexpectedly won the parliamentary elections. "We do not support this meeting."

Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for Olmert, described the talks as part of the "pre-negotiation stage" in which issues of substance would not be discussed. "What we're doing is trying to get to a point where each side trusts the other," she said, adding that some of the discussion with Rice will be aimed at determining a role for the United States, as well as for moderate Arab states such as Jordan, in any future negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

Rice's presence at the meeting would mark the first time in four years that the Bush administration has intervened so directly in the long-running conflict. In June 2003, the road map was launched with great fanfare at a summit in Aqaba, Jordan, attended by Bush, Sharon and Abbas, at the time the Palestinian prime minister.

But the Americans quickly found themselves dragged into a tedious discussion about highway checkpoints, settlement construction and prisoner exchanges. The process collapsed a few months later when Abbas quit in a dispute with then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

In their first one-on-one meeting, Olmert last month promised Abbas that he would remove some military checkpoints in the West Bank and release $100 million of the more than $500 million in frozen tax revenue that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinians. But Olmert, who has pledged to strengthen Abbas's political standing as he confronts Hamas, has yet to release the promised funds. And there has been virtually no progress in reducing the Israeli obstacles to Palestinian movement inside the West Bank.

Rice said that Olmert and Abbas were developing a "fruitful channel bilaterally" for such issues and that it was not her intention to insert "an American presence" at every meeting between the two men.

Correspondent Scott Wilson in Jerusalem contributed to this report.