U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice left the region Wednesday afternoon for Brussels, with Mission Accomplished. PA President Mahmoud Abbas agreed to resume negotiations with Israel after a suspension due to an Israeli military incursion into Gaza last week that took a very large toll in human life. At last count, some 129 Palestinian deaths have been recorded. Many of them were children.
In a briefing with reporters travelling with her on the plane to a NATO meeting in Brussels, Rice played down the drama of the Palestinian turn-around: “I talked directly with President Abbas. He said he – there was not to be a condition. I mean, there is no conditionality here. It’s obvious that he feels strongly that there needs to be a calmer environment and there needs to be a cessation of violence. I said that all of this will, of course, be greatly improved if the environment is calm. But we’ve been working on this with the Palestinians over the last – really, before I got here, but the last two days pretty intensively to try to come up with a way of going forward that would not just resume negotiations, but make the ground for those negotiations more robust and more resistant to the kind of turbulence that we’re bound to see. This happens every time there is movement toward peace somebody tries to disturb it. And so, yes, I have spent a lot of time with Israelis as well as with the Palestinians about how we could really get moving forward on some of the projects that the Palestinians want to do, that Tony Blair wants to do. I understand the security problems quite well. I’m the one who negotiated the movement and access agreement. I understand that it’s hard. I remember in, I think it was actually in an answer to Helene some time ago, that I said that one of the reasons after ’05 that I really became convinced that without political momentum it was difficult to just make things on the ground work was the experience with movement and access. It’s — the reverse is also true. Without movement on the ground, it’s also hard to make the political negotiations sustainable. That’s why when we constructed Annapolis, it was constructed deliberately with different pillars. So we’ve spent time on that. We’re going to continue to spend time on that. I hope that we can help on some of the impediments that might be there, to get some of the major projects that Tony Blair would like to get moving, moving. And on roadmap obligations, there really is need for improvement on both sides. No one is doing this particularly well. And so I think it’s a good time — I got the first report from General Fraser, who is going about this in a very systematic way and I think it’s now — and he believes it’s now time for a trilateral. But I’m quite aware of the fact that that was important for Abu Mazen as a part of the way to make sure that the ground is really there for the negotiations to go forward”.