Play Video Video:Clinton to send US envoys to Syria BBC Play Video Barack Obama Video:President Obama Promoting Long Term Recovery CBS 2 New York Play Video Barack Obama Video:Obama's agenda comes with risks, rewards AP AFP/Pool – US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is to meet with Palestinian leaders as she pushes on with "aggressive" … RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held talks on Wednesday with Palestinian leaders concerned over whether Israel's next government will commit to a U.S.-backed peace process leading to a Palestinian state.
A day after pledging the new Obama administration would always protect Israel's security, Clinton visited the Israeli-occupied West Bank to deliver a message of support for President Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority.
"We are very committed to your efforts in this leadership of President Abbas," Clinton told Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, pointman in Western-backed reconstruction plans for the Gaza Strip that freeze out the territory's Hamas Islamist rulers.
Hamas, which won a parliamentary election in 2006, violently wrested control of the Gaza Strip from Abbas's Fatah faction in 2007. The West shuns Hamas over its refusal to recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept existing interim peace deals.
Clinton is on her first visit to the region as secretary of state during a time of political transition in Israel, which held an election on February 10 that led to right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu being invited to form a government by April 3.
The Likud party leader's reluctance to commit to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, a "two-state solution" to the Middle East conflict, could put him on a collision course with the Obama White House.
Clinton met Netanyahu and other political leaders in Jerusalem on Tuesday and pledged that Washington would be "vigorously engaged" in the pursuit of a Palestinian state, an outcome she said would be in Israel's best interests.
Saleh Rafat, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's Executive Committee, said Abbas would tell Clinton later in the day there would be no peace negotiations unless Israel agreed unequivocally to a two-state solution.
SETTLEMENTS
Rafat said Abbas also would urge Clinton to press Israel to halt settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinians fear Israeli settlements on occupied land, deemed illegal by the World Court, could deny them a viable state.
Netanyahu, mirroring the policy of the outgoing government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, has said he would not build new settlements but expand existing ones to accommodate the "natural growth" of their populations.
A U.S.-backed peace "road map" that has served as the foundation of Israeli-Palestinian talks that were restarted under the Bush administration in 2007 calls for a halt to all Israeli settlement activity, including "natural growth."
Bush, who was regarded by Israel as one of its best allies, brought little pressure to bear on Israeli leaders over the issue. Israel has said it intends to keep major West Bank settlement blocs in any future peace deal.
Netanyahu said on Tuesday he and Clinton found "common ground" and would cooperate.
He has enough votes in parliament to form a right-wing government but has been trying to enlist centrist partners in an apparent bid to avoid friction with Washington.
A former prime minister, Netanyahu has proposed shifting the focus of currently stalled peace negotiations from territorial issues to shoring up the Palestinian economy, a concept Palestinian leaders have rejected. He is not against setting up a Palestinian state, but says that should not be the guaranteed outcome of negotiations yet to be held with Israel.
In her talks in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Clinton also called for the consolidation of a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, where Israel in December launched a devastating 22-day offensive in a declared bid to halt cross-border rocket attacks.
(Writing by Jeffrey Heller, Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Richard Balmforth)
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