U.S. President Barack Obama's Middle East peace envoy will wrap up his current shuttle talks on Sunday with a second meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an Israeli official said on Saturday, according to Reuters. Obama has made solving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute a centrepiece of his foreign policy and assigned U.S. Senator George Mitchell as his troubleshooter in January. The president said he expected a status report some time this month. Netanyahu, who has resisted U.S. pressure to freeze Jewish settlement on occupied land where Palestinians seek a state, on Friday held what his office called "constructive" talks with Mitchell. The envoy met two top Netanyahu aides on Saturday. Obama's diplomatic drive has shown few tangible results other than a handshake meeting that he hosted between Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in New York last month. Netanyahu's right-leaning coalition government includes some nationalists for whom the very idea of Palestinian independence in the West Bank, biblical territory which Israel captured from Jordan in a 1967 war, is anathema. Abbas has credibility problems, as his armed Islamist Hamas rivals control the Gaza Strip -- half the Palestinian entity -- and rule out any permanent peace accord with the Jewish state. The Obama administration has tried to frame the talks within a vision of a wider Israeli-Arab peace deal. But Arab states have shown little appetite for new overtures toward Israel. "We do not underestimate the difficulties for us or for the parties, but we all have obligations to do everything we can to help achieve the goal of comprehensive peace that will be good for the Palestinians, good for the Israelis, good for all the people in this region," Mitchell, on his ninth mission to the region, said after meeting Abbas in the West Bank on Friday. Mitchell flew to Cairo on Saturday night, Egyptian airport officials said. A U.S. State Department spokesman said the envoy would meet Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman and Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit before returning to Tel Aviv. Egypt was the first in the Arab world to recognise Israel and now mediates with Hamas, against whom Israel fought a December-January war which derailed peace talks at the time. Hamas has since made efforts to stop the Palestinian cross-border rocket attacks which Israel said had provoked its Gaza offensive, and is now in Egyptian- and German-brokered talks on a possible prisoner swap with the Israelis. A wider Israeli-Hamas truce deal would bring stability but may leave unanswered the question of whether Islamist Hamas or Abbas's secular Fatah faction speaks for the Palestinians. Egypt has been striving for intra-Palestinian reconciliation. A deal was due to be signed on Oct. 25 but has been thrown into doubt by Hamas anger at Abbas's response to a deferred U.N. vote on a report condemning Israel's Gaza tactics. There are also mixed Israeli messages on the prospects for coexistence. Hawkish Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said before meeting Mitchell that he saw no chance of peace soon. But centre-left Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Mitchell that "the time had come to move determinately forward" and that comprehensive peace in the Middle East would be a "win-win" situation for all involved.
