Rice says Israel, Palestinians agree to resume talks

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Wednesday Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to resume peace talks suspended over an Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip, but she did not specify a date.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said earlier the negotiations could not get under way again until Israel reached a ceasefire with militants behind cross-border rocket attacks from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Abbas' comments touched off a flurry of behind-the-scenes lobbying by Rice with the Palestinians. After speaking to Abbas by telephone, she told a news conference a truce was not a condition for restarting the talks on Palestinian statehood.

"I've been informed by the parties that they intend to resume the negotiations and that they are in contact with one another as to how to bring this about," Rice said at a news conference with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

Rice, ending a two-day visit to Israel and the West Bank, did not say when the next round of talks, which the United States hopes can result in an agreement before US President George W. Bush leaves office in January, would be held.

Abbas' office issued a statement after he spoke to Rice that did not repeat his condition for talks. It said Rice was exerting efforts to "enforce a mutual calm" and Abbas' intention was to "resume the peace process and negotiations".

Rice said a special US-Israeli-Palestinian committee would meet next week to examine to what extent the sides were meeting their commitments under a long-stalled peace "Road Map".

Egyptian involvement

A statement issued on Wednesday by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office after a security cabinet meeting on Wednesday said it would act "Continuously and systematically" to halt the salvoes and try to weaken Hamas.

But it stopped short of threatening a broad ground offensive in the Gaza Strip which some of Olmert's ministers have urged him to launch in the territory of 1.5 million people.

Israel, the statement said, wanted to "push forward with negotiations with the Palestinian Authority while maintaining freedom of action in the fight against terror".

A spokesman for Olmert indicated, however, that Israel might hold its fire if Gaza gunmen did the same.

"If they were not shooting at our civilian population, we would not have to respond," the spokesman said, voicing a position Israeli officials have expressed in the past.

At the news conference, Rice said she was sending David Welch, the US Assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, to Cairo, which European Union officials see as key to brokering a ceasefire and the reopening of Gaza's border with Egypt.

Welch, she said, would discuss with the Egyptians "the entire situation" in the Gaza Strip.

Cairo also has been trying to mediate a deal between Israel and Hamas on exchanging an Israeli soldier seized by the Islamist group in 2006 for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in an Israeli jail.