WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will visit Egypt, Israel and the West Bank next week to personally take stock of prospects for navigating a "new path" in the Middle East, officials said Thursday.
On her second overseas voyage as America's top diplomat, Clinton also will attend meetings in Brussels, Belgium, with NATO allies and European Union officials; hold talks in Geneva with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on arms control and Afghanistan; and meet senior Turkish leaders in Ankara.
Clinton will depart Washington on Sunday, one week after returning from a whirlwind tour of Asian capitals.
The State Department had previously announced that Clinton would attend an international conference in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheik on Monday but had not announced the rest of her itinerary. Officials have said Clinton will make a U.S. pledge of some $900 million at the Sharm el-Sheik conference to contribute to the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of its war with Israel.
High-level representatives from some 80 countries are to attend the Gaza pledging conference. Clinton will be accompanied by George Mitchell, the Obama administration's special envoy for Mideast peace, who was holding talks Thursday in Israel.
The Hamas Islamic movement, which rules Gaza, has put its damage figure from the Israel assault at $2.73 billion.
"From positive talks with the donors, I expect the donations to exceed the required figures," Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told a West Bank news conference Thursday.
Hamas, which is shunned by much of the international community and is considered a terrorist organization by the United States, is not invited to the conference. Instead, the Palestinians will be represented by Fayyad and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
State Department spokesman Robert A. Wood said in announcing Clinton's trip that she will meet with Abbas when she visits the West Bank.
Clinton will be in Israel at an awkward time, with a caretaker government awaiting efforts by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to put together a governing coalition following inconclusive national elections Feb. 10. It appears likely that Netanyahu will end up forging a coalition with nationalist and religious parties opposed to peacemaking with the Palestinians and Israel's other Arab neighbors.
In remarks to reporters at the State Department, Wood said Clinton's intention in visiting Israel is to get a feel for prospects for restarting Israel-Palestinian peace talks and strengthening the cease-fire between Israel and Gaza.
"The objective of the secretary is to try to see — to take the pulse of the various leaders" in the region, Wood said. "And get a sense of what the reality is on the ground."
He said there is no plan for Clinton to meet with her Syrian counterpart while they are both at the Gaza donors conference in Sharm el-Sheik. Even so, the Obama administration is committed to engaging the Syrian government, he added.
U.S.-Syrian relations long have been tense, particularly since the U.S. ambassador was withdrawn by the Bush administration in 2005 to protest Syria's suspected role in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Syria denied involvement but in the uproar that followed was forced to withdraw its troops from Lebanon, ending a 29-year military presence.
Wood noted that Syria's ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha, met for nearly two hours Thursday with Jeffrey Feltman, the State Department's top diplomat for the Middle East. He said the session was meant to make clear to the Syrians that the administration awaits concrete action that shows a change in the Syrian government's behavior in terms of facilitating terrorism and pursuing dangerous weapons.
"We want to take a new path in the Middle East, we want to engage the Syrians, but Syria has to take some steps and show that it's interested in engaging with the United States and addressing some of these issues that are of concern," Wood said.
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Topic: Clinton to scope out 'new path' in Mideast (Read 485 times)