Abbas wants framework accord at Mideast conference

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Sept 2 (Reuters) Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said today he wanted a planned West Asia conference to result in a framework agreement for Israeli-Palestinian peace and set a timeline for implementation.

''We are concerned that November 15 will come -- if this will indeed be the date for this international conference -- without arriving at a specific agreement on all the issues, and that this meeting will be described as a failure,'' Abbas said.

Abbas has been pressing a reluctant Israel to discuss in depth matters at the core of any future agreement on Palestinian statehood -- the shape of final borders and the fate of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees.

''We need a framework agreement with a timeline for implementation,'' he said at a news conference with Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief.

''We do not want a meeting that results in merely a statement.

We do not want a meeting that will end up a failure for everybody,'' Abbas said.

A senior Abbas aide said the Palestinian leader and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert failed to bridge their differences on the issue at their last meeting, on August. 28.

Abbas said last week the conference proposed by US President George W Bush would be a waste of time if Israel continued to seek only a broadbrush ''declaration of principles''.

Israeli officials have used that phrase to describe what Olmert might offer in answer to calls for rapid, final talks in details on establishing a Palestinian state.

Raising the bar too high, the officials have said, could lead to disappointment and crush renewed efforts to revive peacemaking stalled by seven years of violence.

POLITICAL WEAKNESS Both Abbas and Olmert have been weakened politically in recent months, raising doubts among Israeli and Palestinians over their ability to deliver on any peace promises.

Abbas's Fatah faction lost control of the Gaza Strip in June to Hamas Islamists shunned by the West.

Olmert was roundly criticised by an Israeli inquiry into last year's Lebanon war in which Israel failed to crush Hezbollah guerrillas. He is awaiting its final report, expected to be released next year, that could seal his political future.

In the run-up to the Middle East conference, Israel reopened today a government debate on the fate of unauthorised Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, but gave no sign their promised removal was imminent.

Under a US-backed peace ''road map'', the Israeli government pledged to remove dozens of ''settlement outposts'' erected since March 2001 without its permission.

Israel's left-wing Peace Now group says settlers built 104 such outposts in the West Bank, 52 of them after March 2001. The removal of such sites, some of them vacant, before the West Asia conference could help bolster Abbas but fan right-wing anger against Olmert.

Israeli Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, who attended a ministerial committee meeting on the outposts, said it did not have a mandate to order them scrapped.

REUTERS PDT RK1820