Rice To Mideast Next Week To Push Peace Talks

US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice will visit Israel and the Palestinian territories next week to push peace talks stalled amid escalating violence, Palestinian officials said on Sunday.

Rice "will visit us within the coming days and she will try to push the negotiations," Ahmed Qorei, the former prime minister heading the Palestinian team in the revived Middle East peace talks, told journalists.

Another senior official told AFP on condition of anonymity that Rice would be in the region on February 18. No comment on the planned visit was immediately available from American or Israeli sides.

Israel and the Palestinians officially revived their peace talks in late November at a US conference under Washington's stewardship after a seven-year freeze.

The talks have been overshadowed by Israeli building in occupied Palestinian territory and amid escalating violence that has over the past week seen the first suicide bombing inside Israel in a year and barrages of rockets fired from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

Israeli military operations in Gaza have claimed the lives of at least 20 Palestinians, mostly militants.

"The Israeli escalation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is reflected in the negotiations, like the assassinations, the continuous (West Bank) settlements and the siege of Gaza," Qorei said.

For Israelis, "the rockets of Hamas and the Dimona (suicide) bombing is also reflected in the negotiations," he said.

"The negotiations are not easy and the issues that are negotiated are not easy," he said. "They are difficult negotiations on difficult issues."

Qorei also said that the talks "until now are not substantive. I can describe them as contacts and connections between us to probe the political horizon."

Israel's top peace negotiator, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, said on Sunday that as long as the Islamist movement Hamas controlled Gaza, there was little hope for implementing a future peace agreement.

"There is no hope for the Palestinian people with Hamas... There is no hope for any kind of peace or the vision of a Palestinian state which will include the Gaza Strip without real change on the ground," she told reporters.