Tenet Set to Return to Middle East

George Tenet, the CIA chief, will return to the Middle East early next week to try to bring about a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine, a senior Palestinian official said today.

If correct, Mr Tenet's arrival will signal a resumption of US attempts to mediate a truce following its suspension last month after the failure of two ceasefire missions by Anthony Zinni, Washington's special envoy to the region.

Mr Tenet brokered a truce last year, but failed to make it stick.

Meanwhile, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, will shortly be making his fourth visit to the White House in a year. His three-day visit will centre around talks in Washington on Thursday with George Bush, the US president. Mr Sharon is hoping the US will help Israel to isolate Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and to thwart what Israel sees as Iran's attempts to destabilise the Middle East. President Bush has previously rebuked Mr Arafat for not doing enough to rein in Palestinian militants.

In interviews last week, Mr Sharon said he planned to ask Mr Bush to go a step further and cut all contacts with Mr Arafat, a decision that would likely strengthen the view in the Arab world that the US is biased in Israel's favour.

Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, said yesterday that the Palestinian leader must act decisively to confront the sources of terror and choose "peace over violence".

But the Israeli defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who is already in the US, has said that Mr Arafat is not a partner for negotiations and asked US officials to sidestep the Palestinian leader and hold talks with other officials instead.

"I don't think there is any way to continue to work with Arafat as long as he is still putting himself in a position to be committed to the past and not to the future," Mr Ben-Eliezer said yesterday after talks with Kofi Annan, secretary general of the UN.

Israel has been trying for months to isolate Mr Arafat diplomatically. For the past two months, he has been under virtual house arrest in his West Bank compound. His incarceration is seen as an attempt to make him crack down on militants carrying out attacks on Israelis.

Palestinian officials have said they suspect Mr Sharon's true aim is to topple their elected leader, and said that weakening Mr Arafat will only make it more difficult for him to control the militants.

Israeli and US officials said that the Bush-Sharon meeting, initiated by the president, was not about hammering out any new blueprint for peace in the Middle East, but was aimed at coordinating strategies between the two countries.

Mr Sharon's adviser, Raanan Gissin, said Israel would be lobbying for the continued diplomatic isolation of Mr Arafat and would urge unspecified US action against what it sees as a constantly rising threat from Iran, which Mr Bush said last week formed an "axis of evil" with North Korea and Iraq.

"Iran's tentacles, reaching through Syria and Lebanon, are liable to destabilise not only our affairs but they will also have an effect on an international level," he said.

Israel accuses Iran of:

supplying Hezbollah with thousands of missiles with which to attack Israel from their Lebanese bases

· trying to recruit Israeli Arabs for attacks on their Jewish compatriots

· secretly developing nuclear weapons

· trying to smuggle a shipload [the Karine A] of arms and ammunition to Mr Arafat's Palestinian Authority

"Since the Karine A episode, Iran has loomed larger on the Israeli agenda," a US official told the Associated Press.

Mr Ben-Eliezer, meanwhile, said he has asked US officials for advance notice in the event of an attack on Iraq.

"It's important that we get an alert beforehand in order to prepare ... We are taking into consideration that if Iraq will be attacked, we are likely to be one of its first targets," he said.