PARIS: France s Foreign Minister was leaving Monday on a Middle Eastern trip aimed at helping restart the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the ministry said. Bernard Kouchner is to travel to Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon over four days, it said. On his first stop, Israel, Kouchner is to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, President Shimon Peres, the foreign and defense ministers, as well as opposition Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu. He is to meet in the West Bank with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and also with ex-British premier Tony Blair, now the representative of the Quartet of Middle East mediators. Kouchner s visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories - his first since he was named minister earlier this year - comes following a spate of positive developments on the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, including regular meetings over the past months between Israeli and Palestinian officials and the announcement of an upcoming US-sponsored Mideast peace conference. At this moment in which the dialogue has restarted and is intensifying, the minister thought it was important to show our availability and express our encouragement for the dialogue to continue, spokesman Frederic Desagneaux wrote in an online briefing on Friday. Today is the moment to restart the peace process. Kouchner is expected to travel Wednesday to Jordan for meetings with King Abdullah II and Foreign Minister Abdul-Ilah Al-Khatib. From there he will travel Wednesday evening to Egypt, where he is slated to meet with President Hosni Mubarak, the country s defense and foreign ministers and the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. Mubarak has expressed doubts about the proposed Mideast conference, warning on Sunday that without proper preparations it will be a failure. Jordan s King Abdullah has expressed similar concerns about the conference. The conference, an initiative of US President George W. Bush, is aimed at tackling outstanding issues between Israelis and Palestinians. It is tentatively scheduled for November but the specific agenda remains uncertain. Kouchner is to end his trip Thursday in Lebanon, the ministry said. Kouchner, who co-founded the humanitarian aid group Doctors Without Borders, has made a priority of encouraging dialogue between the Western-backed government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Seniora and the Hezbollah-led opposition, which are locked in a fierce power struggle. In July, he hosted leaders from 14 feuding Christian and Muslim factions for a conference in France and visited Lebanon later the same month.
