Syria ready for peace talks with Israel

DAMASCUS (Syria)—Syria’s foreign minister said Monday his country was ready to resume peace talks with Israel and he urged the Jewish state’s government to heed calls from within the country for renewed negotiations.
“We appreciate the Israeli voices who call for the resumption of the peace process with Syria,” said Walid al-Moallem, urging the Israeli government to respond and resume talks.
If Israel agrees, “it will find Syria ready to resume peace negotiations,” the foreign minister said during a news conference in Damascus with his Norwegian counterpart, Jonas Gahr Store.
Store said he had “frank and direct discussions” with Syrian President Bashar Assad during his one-day stop in Syria. He urged Syria and Israel to reach an overall regional agreement in accordance with U.N. resolutions.
He also described the latest violence in the Gaza Strip as “an extremely urgent and dramatic situation,” referring to an Israeli offensive that has killed more than 50 people in six days. Store called on Palestinian militants to stop firing rockets at Israel, and for Israelis to cease their “disproportionate military response.”
Israeli-Syrian peace talks broke down in 2000, with Syria demanding assurances that Israel would return the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau captured in the 1967 Mideast War. Israel wanted modifications to the pre-1967 border and insisted that the issues of security and normalization be spelled out first.
Israel now says it will only talk peace with Syria once Damascus stops supporting groups hostile to the Jewish state. “Israel wants peace with all our neighbors including Syria,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev on Monday, responding to the Syrian comments.
“But it is very difficult to take the Syrian government seriously as a partner in peace when that government has strategic alliances with the enemies of peace, including Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”
Al-Moallem’s call for talks on Monday came as an Israeli newspaper reported that the army was preparing for the possibility that either Syria or Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon could start another war with Israel by next summer.
The Haaretz daily reported that top army brass believe that either Syria or Hezbollah — or possibly both together — might attack Israel with backing from Iran. The Syrian minister dismissed the report.
“Using force is not solving the issue ... We hope that in 2007 we will have a peace process to settle the issue,” al-Moallem said.
Israeli forces pulled out of a battered northern Gaza town on Tuesday after their biggest operation in the Palestinian territory in a year, leaving residents to bury their dead.
“This is the worst raid we have ever witnessed,” said Khalil Yazji, a 45-year-old resident and police officer. “The Israeli army has brought destruction into every single street and nearly into every single house. This is the tsunami of Beit Hanoun.”
Israeli forces killed five gunmen and a civilian and wounded 13 people on Tuesday in raids on three other areas in the northern Gaza Strip, staging grounds for rocket attacks on southern Israel, militant groups and hospital officials said.
“The Israelis leave one area and enter another,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said. “We have spoken to the American administration and to the Europeans that such a situation cannot help restoring security and stability.”—Agencies