CAIRO - US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, facing an Arab backlash over her praise for Israel's offer to
ease settlement growth, headed to Cairo on Tuesday for hastily convened
talks with President Hosni Mubarak.
Clinton was expected to
arrive in the evening and go straight into a meeting with Egyptian
Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit and intelligence chief Omar Suleiman,
Egyptian and US officials said.
She was to meet Mubarak on Wednesday morning to discuss Washington's faltering efforts to revive the Middle East peace process.
Abul
Gheit, according to the official MENA news agency, said Clinton had
asked for the meeting with Mubarak to discuss her administration's
efforts to revive Palestinian-Israeli talks, adding that the peace
process was "now passing into a critical stage."
On Monday, Abul
Gheit told Clinton in a phone conversation that Egypt supported the
Palestinian stance, which refuses negotiations with Israel before a
complete halt to settlement building, the agency reported.
Cairo
has been mediating between the rival factions, Hamas in the Gaza Strip
and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah in the West Bank, who
have been split since Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007.
Clinton
extended her regional trip after she was criticised for praising as
"unprecedented" a pledge by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
to limit settlement growth, steps that fall far short of previous US
demands for a complete halt to all settlement activity.
She also
called for a speedy resumption of peace talks that were suspended
during the Gaza war at the turn of the year, despite the Palestinian
insistence that must Israel freeze settlement activity first.
Clinton
later clarified her comments to say that Washington still considers the
settlements to be illegal and admitted she could have spoken more
clearly.
"I think President (Barack) Obama was absolutely clear.
He wanted a halt to all settlement activity," she said in an interview
with Al-Jazeera television.
"Perhaps those of us who work with him and for him could have been clearer in communicating that that is his policy," she said.
A US State Department official denied the stopover in Cairo is aimed at damage control.
Abul Gheit said Cairo wants to hear Clinton's clarifications of her remarks.
"She
has given specific clarifications... and we want to listen to the
clarifications directly and then assess the situation," MENA quoted him
as saying.
Egypt wants guarantees from Washington to assure the
Palestinians that the negotiations "will not be used to waste time or
be used for achieving Israeli goals," he added.
The settlements
in the West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in
1967, are home to nearly 500,000 Israelis and are considered illegal by
the international community.
Arab officials accused Obama's
administration of reneging on its call earlier this year for a complete
end to settlement building and said Clinton's clarifications did not go
far enough.
"Clinton's backtracking on her remarks, especially
with regard to the partial freeze of settlements, is not sufficient to
restart negotiations with Israel," Palestinian Authority spokesman
Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP.
Although Washington had said it did
not consider a settlement freeze a precondition for the resumption of
peace talks, Clinton's comments appeared to place the onus for its
effort's success on Abbas.
Abbas, who had held peace talks with
Netanyahu's predecessor Ehud Olmert in the absence of a settlement
freeze, cannot afford to be seen as succumbing to Israeli pressure,
analysts say.
"It's hard for him to backtrack and give Hamas
another card, for his popularity to drop domestically," said Imad Gad,
an analyst with the Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
Abbas's
popularity dipped after he supported the delay of a UN vote last month
on endorsing a report that accused Israel and Hamas of war crimes
during the 22-day Gaza war. He went on to endorse a subsequent vote
after withering criticism from Hamas and his own party.
Osama
Hamdan, a Beirut-based senior official with Hamas, which opposes peace
talks with Israel, said Clinton's comments showed that "hopes in Obama
were misplaced."