Rice Calls Meeting of Quartet in New Push for Middle East Peace

The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, will attempt to inject impetus into the drive for an Israeli-Palestine peace settlement by convening a meeting of the Quartet of Middle East negotiators early next month, for the first time for almost six months. Ms Rice yesterday met Tony Blair in London to brief him on her five-day trip across the Middle East. She will also host an informal summit with the Israelis and Palestinians, probably later in February.

In another move aimed at strengthening the position of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in his continuing standoff with Hamas, Israel is to hand over $100m (£51m) in frozen tax revenues to his office. Since Hamas won elections and formed a government in March last year, Israel has refused to pass on Palestinian tax revenues worth around $60m a month, saying that it must first renounce violence, recognise Israel and adhere to previous peace agreements.

Israel, together with the US and Britain, is trying to strengthen the position of the more moderate Mr Abbas as a way of bypassing the Hamas government. An Israeli official said the $100m would be passed to the president's office by today.

The move follows a meeting between the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and Mr Abbas last month and comes days after Ms Rice met both men. The US has already committed $128m to train and equip Mr Abbas's armed force, known as the presidential guard, and promote what it calls democratic alternatives to Hamas.

Both Mr Blair and Ms Rice believe there is a strategic realignment under way in the Middle East that means Israel and the Sunni Arab states may now have a mutual interest in seeing a Palestinian state, as one way of reining back a resurgent Iran.

Several European countries, including Germany, want the Quartet - the US, UN, Russia and the EU - to play a bigger role in the Middle East peace process. The Quartet meeting would also prevent competing peace proposals being advanced.

Both Britain and the US now believe that the process set out in the 2003 Middle East "road map" - which requires a series of phased mutual confidence-building measures - is too cumbersome and liable to break down, making it very difficult to get to discussions on what a final settlement might constitute.

Ms Rice stressed that her plan for informal talks between Mr Olmert and Mr Abbas should not be seen as an international peace conference, but as "pre-negotiations". Mr Abbas said this week he would not accept an interim Palestinian state with temporary borders.

Mr Blair has for years been privately urging the Bush administration to take a much more active role in convening talks on a two-state solution between Palestine and Israel. There is also a widespread view in Downing Street that a settlement between Israel and Palestine could dampen the violence in Iraq, weaken Iran and, more widely, remove a grievance on which al-Qaida feeds to gather support.

Ms Rice told Mr Blair last night that she favoured a concerted, unified approach, and it might be necessary to examine whether the peace proposals set out in the 2003 road map could be blended with rival plans drawn up by the Saudis.

Mr Abbas is due to travel to Damascus tomorrow to meet Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas's political bureau, who lives in exile in Syria. The two men will again try to bridge the widening gap between their rival factions. Efforts during the past seven months to form a Palestinian coalition government of national unity have repeatedly failed.