The US Vice President Mr Dick Cheney said today he hoped for an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire by tomorrow, and acknowledged the conflict had dominated his talks with Arab leaders on extending the war on terrorism.
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Mr Dick Cheney meets the King of Bahrain, Sheik Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa today
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Mr Cheney, on an 11-nation Middle East trip, is to arrive in Israel tomorrow and will immediately meet US special envoy Mr Anthony Zinni, trying to prepare for the resumption of peace talks.
"General Zinni is the one who is sort of on the firing line, in the midst of the efforts to negotiate a ceasefire between the Israelis and Palestinians, and I hope he will have something positive to report by the time I arrive," he told a Bahrain news conference with Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa.
"There is no question that the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is a preoccupation for everybody in this part of the world," Mr Cheney said before leaving Bahrain for Qatar.
Mr Cheney is seeking support for preventing Iraq's ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction. But he denied today he was in the region to organise a military adventure with respect to Iraq, and dismissed as a speculative bubble the issue of whether Washington would use military force.
Yesterday, Mr Cheney and Crown Prince Abdullah talked into the night about the Saudi peace initiative, which offers Arab normalisation of relations with Israel in return for Israeli withdrawal from Arab lands captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
Mr Cheney also invited Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler to visit Washington, and the official Saudi Press Agency said Prince Abdullah had accepted the offer, nine months after he snubbed a similar invitation over perceived US bias towards Israel.