After coming under heavy pressure from the United States, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, said Wednesday that he intended to resume negotiations with Israel on a peace plan.
But he did not say when he would return to talks, and he is under political pressure at home not to do so if the Palestinian death toll continues to rise from Israeli attacks on Gaza.
Mr. Abbas suspended negotiations over the weekend during Israeli operations to stop rocket fire from Gaza that left 126 Palestinians, including civilians, dead since Feb. 27. Three Israelis also died, two soldiers in the fighting and one civilian in a rocket attack.
Mr. Abbas’s decision to return to the negotiating table followed talks with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Even winning Mr. Abbas’s somewhat vague agreement proved difficult.
Ms. Rice apparently had interpreted talks with Mr. Abbas as having ended with his commitment to return unconditionally to peace talks, Israeli and American officials said. But then Mr. Abbas told reporters he would return only when Israel reached a truce with Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that controls Gaza.
That prompted Ms. Rice to interrupt her lunch with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and telephone Mr. Abbas, Israeli and American officials said.
Shortly afterward, the Palestinian president released a statement that the peace process was a “strategic choice and we have the intention of resuming.” He did not list any preconditions.
Mr. Abbas’s hesitancy provides further evidence of just how hard it will be for President Bush to achieve his stated goal of a peace deal by January, the end of his term. And the resolute tone at Israel’s security cabinet on Wednesday did not seem to suggest an imminent truce.
The security cabinet refrained from approving a large-scale military operation of the kind that Defense Minister Ehud Barak has been threatening. But it decided that Israel would act “continuously and systematically” in order to bring an end to the rocket fire from Gaza.
More than 200 rockets have been fired over the past week, according to Israeli military officials, including longer-range Katyusha-style rockets.
On Wednesday morning, two rockets were launched against Israel, an army spokeswoman said. There were no reports of damage or casualties.
In Gaza, the militant groups Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for the rocket fire, saying it was in retaliation for a limited Israeli army operation on Tuesday night aimed at a local Islamic Jihad leader. The militant leader was killed in clashes, and a month-old baby was killed in the cross-fire, Palestinian officials said.
Israel had withdrawn its forces from the northern Gaza Strip just the day before, after a two-day assault.
Ms. Livni said Wednesday that the violence was to be expected and that neither Israelis nor Palestinians should let it get in the way of the peace talks. She obliquely criticized Mr. Abbas for suspending the talks on Sunday and noted that Israel had not pulled out of the talks when rockets from Gaza hit Israel.
“I’m not going to enter a kind of blame game, but clearly I expect my co-partners to do the same, and I said that to them as well,” she said during a news conference with Ms. Rice.
But several Middle East experts said Mr. Abbas needs something tangible to enable him to convince Palestinians that he — and not Hamas’s leaders — can negotiate a peace that includes the establishment of a Palestinian state. The experts said the dismantling of roadblocks and some Israeli settlements would help Mr. Abbas.
On Wednesday morning, the Israelis did take one small step, but that effort fell short. The Israelis sent a small force to an illegal hilltop settlement outpost in the northern West Bank. The site, Esh Kodesh, falls into the category of outposts that Israel has pledged to dismantle.
The forces disconnected a pipe bringing water from the settlement’s tower, then left. An hour later, the settlers had reconnected the pipe, witnesses said.
Ms. Rice was in the Middle East to move peace talks forward, but the increased violence meant that she had to spend much of her time trying to get Mr. Abbas back to the table.
Ms. Rice said that an American general overseeing implementation of some parts of the peace deal would hold his first joint meeting with Israelis and Palestinians, where the United States would serve as arbiter over whether both sides are doing what they promised to do.
“I do understand the difficult circumstances for President Abbas, but I think he’s made the right decision,” Ms. Rice told reporters later on her flight from Jerusalem to Brussels, where she is to attend a NATO meeting.
A report on Wednesday by eight British-based relief and human rights organizations, including Amnesty International U.K., says the humanitarian situation in Gaza is now the worst it has been since the Israeli occupation began in 1967.
The report said 80 percent of Gaza’s 1.5 million people were dependent on food aid, compared with 63 percent in 2006. Unemployment is close to 40 percent, and 95 percent of Gaza’s industrial operations have been suspended because of a ban on the import of raw materials and on all exports, the report added.
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