The Palestinian and Israeli leaders agreed on Thursday to meet for the first time in two months after the violent Islamist take-over of the Gaza Strip prompted each side to adopt a common approach to the enclave.
Mahmoud Abbas, the Western-backed Palestinian president, will meet Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday, officials said. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah will meet Abbas there on Sunday before the four-way summit.
Before the meeting, Israel's cabinet is expected to agree on Sunday to release hundreds of millions of dollars of Palestinian tax revenues, collected by Israeli officials and withheld for the past 15 months since the Islamist Hamas movement formed a Palestinian government after winning a parliamentary election.
In his turn, Abbas is issuing orders to disband militia groups - both from Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade which is nominally loyal to his own, secular Fatah faction.
Along with the United States and European Union, Israel refused to deal with Hamas on the grounds that it refused to renounce violence or formally recognise Israel's right to exist. Complex Western efforts to bolster Abbas, leader of the long dominant secular Fatah faction, while continuing to shun Hamas have, since the Islamists seized control in Gaza last week, been replaced with a simple lifting of sanctions on the larger, Fatah-run West Bank, where Abbas rules from Ramallah.
Israel, which withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, is letting nothing but essential humanitarian supplies through its tight security cordon around the coastal enclave. Abbas, in an unusually emotional speech on Wednesday to leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), ruled out any dialogue with Hamas, saying he felt personally outraged by its take-over in Gaza and accusing it of trying to kill him.
He last met Olmert in April, despite an undertaking by both to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in March that they would meet every two weeks to try to find common ground for resuming negotiations on a peace deal that both sides say should provide for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Olmert's popularity has been at rock bottom since last year's war in Lebanon and Abbas led a Palestinian Authority divided between his Fatah group and a Hamas-led government, so neither has seemed able to deliver new negotiating options.
The schism between the West Bank and Gaza, after six days of fighting that killed over 100 people, has left Palestinians' hopes for a state in both territories in grave jeopardy. However, Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for Olmert, said he would meet Abbas "to talk about mutual cooperation and ways to go forward on the Israeli-Palestinian track" and events in Gaza.
In the West Bank, a governing body of the Palestine Liberation Organisation headed by Abbas called after a meeting for the dissolution of all militias, including Hamas and Fatah forces - a move demanded by Israel and Washington. In Gaza, protesters burned Abbas's effigy, denouncing him as a US puppet. Sami Abu Zuhri of Hamas accused Abbas of being part of "an Israeli, American and regional plot".
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