Arab leaders agreed on Tuesday to restart a Middle East peace initiative, offering Israel normal relations in return for withdrawal to its 1967 borders, officials said at the Arab summit meeting in Algiers.
The formal restating of the 2002 initiative, which Israel has repeatedly rejected, will take place on Wednesday in the closing session of the two-day meeting, they said.
But all 22 members of the Arab League have agreed to a final communiqué, which sets out the conditions Israel must meet for all Arab states to declare the Arab-Israeli conflict over.
These conditions include a withdrawal, a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas suggested at the summit to send a small group of Arab leaders to present the plan to the U.S., European Union, United Nations and Russia.
An Arab peace initiative
Jordanian Foreign Minister Hani al-Mulki said the final communiqué has been approved, including the Arab peace initiative and the Jordanian resolution.
Mulki said earlier that asking the summit to restate the peace initiative was having the effect Jordan wanted.
"It has stirred things up," he said. "The whole world now remembers that there is an Arab peace initiative."
Jordan was the driving force behind the reinstating the offer, designed to show Israeli and international public opinion that the Arab states have peaceful intentions.
'Arabs must show world peaceful intentions'
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, a guest at the opening, said he saw a change in the Arab position.
"It (the initiative) is most constructive, (more) than ever before," he said. "I think there is movement. We cannot forget where the previous positions of the Arab League were."
Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the chairman of the summit, said that faced with the attitude of Israel, the Arabs must show the world their peaceful intentions.
"We must make the international community, the conscience of the world and the Jewish people itself bear witness to the strategic nature of the Arab option for peace," he said.
Despite a conditional truce
However, Hamas called on Arab countries not to rush to establish normal relations with Israel, despite Palestinian agreement last week on a conditional truce with until at least the end of this year.
"Nothing has been resolved yet. The land is still occupied and settlements are being expanded day by day and the racist (West Bank) wall is extending into the heart of Palestinian cities and villages," a Hamas statement said.
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