The United States is pressing Israel to go beyond a planned partial settlement freeze and to raise the number of Palestinian prisoners to be freed before a peace conference, Israeli and Western officials said on Sunday.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are expected to meet on Monday in Jerusalem for the last time before attending the conference on Palestinian statehood in Annapolis, Maryland, in just over a week, Israeli and Palestinian officials said.
Looking ahead to peace moves, Olmert said in a speech he was haunted by "tortured thoughts" late at night as he weighed "how to act and what to decide".
Invoking the words of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister at an annual memorial at his grave, Olmert said: "I would not want to be the person accused by our grandchildren, or their grandchildren, of missing a chance for Arab-Jewish peace."
In addition to at least a partial freeze in Jewish settlement building in the occupied West Bank, Olmert plans to ask his cabinet on Monday to approve the release of up to 450 Palestinian prisoners, short of the 2,000 requested by Abbas, Israeli officials said.
US President George W. Bush called for the conference to bolster Abbas and the long-stalled peace process after Hamas Islamists seized the Gaza Strip in June. The Bush administration may also be seeking its own legacy boost after the Iraq war.
Conference preparations have been marred by disputes over a joint document meant to address in general terms issues such as borders, and the future of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees.
US and Israeli officials have stressed the centrepiece of the conference would be an agreement to resume formal statehood negotiations. "Annapolis cannot be a failure because it is already a success just for taking place," Olmert told visiting French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. "It is a launching of talks which have not taken place in seven years in the presence of dozens of countries and the entire world."
Olmert had sought to exempt the occupied West Bank's major settlement blocs, which Israel intends to keep under any final peace deal, from any construction freeze. But Washington rebuffed the idea, Israeli and Western officials said.
A 2003 peace "road map", backed by Washington but never implemented, demands a freeze on "all settlement activity", including so-called "natural growth" of existing settlements, meaning construction to accommodate expanding families.
The road map also calls on the Palestinians to rein in militants. In a refugee camp near the West Bank city of Nablus, Abbas's forces on Sunday surrounded homes where suspected militants were believed to be holed up, sparking a stand-off.
Olmert's office played down US pressure over settlements. "It's not a question of pressure because Israel is fully committed to implementing its obligations under the road map," spokeswoman Miri Eisin said. Some 270,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank among 2.5 million Palestinians. The World Court has branded illegal all settlements on land captured by Israel in the 1967 war.
Freezing all settlement construction might help encourage key Arab states such as Saudi Arabia to attend the Annapolis conference. But it is unclear what impact it would have, given the Defence Ministry has already frozen new building permits.
Palestinian officials said the Annapolis conference would begin on November 26. The main session will be held on November 27, Israeli officials said.
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