- guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 January 2009 19.52 GMT
Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, today led intensifying international efforts to force a ceasefire in Gaza, despite Israel insisting it was not yet ready to call a halt to its eight-day offensive.
Signs have begun to emerge of the shape of a potential deal on a truce and new border arrangements, though analysts said these were still unlikely to be agreed quickly.
Sarkozy flew to Israel after a meeting with the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, about the Gaza crisis. After talks in the West Bank town of Ramallah, the French leader said he would tell Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, that "violence must stop".
"We in Europe want a ceasefire as quickly as possible, and that everyone understands that time is running against peace," Sarkozy said. "The guns must fall silent, there must be a humanitarian truce. Everyone must understand that what is at stake here is not just an issue of Israel and Palestinians, it is a global issue and it is the whole world which will help you find a solution."
Egypt also invited a delegation from Hamas, the Islamist movement fighting Israel, to visit Cairo. Such a visitwould be Hamas's first contact with a key regional player since fighting began 10 days ago.
Sarkozy will tomorrow go on to Syria, Hamas's main Arab supporter.
In other signs of frantic activity, diplomats said Turkey was playing a significant role behind the scenes. Ankara has already publicly offered to convey any Hamas ceasefire proposal to the UN.
It is understood senior Turkish officials met the leaders of Hamas and the smaller, more militant Islamic Jihad faction in Damascus last week. Both are boycotted as terrorists by all western countries.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, is trusted by Hamas because of his Islamist credentials. "The Turks have been talking to all the right people," said one diplomat based in the region. "They are seen as a neutral broker. They are professional and sincere."
Underlining the role played by Turkey, Syria sent its foreign minister, Walid al-Mualim, to Ankara today. "I came to discuss ways to bring about an immediate ceasefire, a removal of the [Israeli] blockade and the opening of all crossings, as well as finding a mechanism to achieve these goals," he said after talks with Ali Babacan, his Turkish counterpart.
In a further development, the UN's special co-ordinator for the Middle East peace process, Robert Serry, was summoned to New York where Arab countries were drafting a security council resolution demanding an immediate end to "Israeli aggression" in Gaza. With UN forces already deployed on Israel's borders with Syria and Lebanon, one possibility being mooted is creating a new one for the border between Gaza and Egypt.
David Miliband, the foreign secretary, is flying to New York tomorrow to take part in the UN debate on the crisis.
"If Sarkozy has something that can pass the security council then the pressure may start on both sides," Ali Jarbawi, a professor of political science at Birzeit University, told the bitterlemons.org website.
But there are signs that hard bargaining lies ahead. Israel wants its offensive to end with an agreement imposed on Gaza by the international community rather than a new ceasefire directly with Hamas. "We don't sign agreements with terror," Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, insisted after meeting an EU delegation yesterday. "We fight terror."
Israel wants Egypt to prevent smuggling into Gaza from its border and its crossings into the territory operating under international supervision. It insists on the presence of the Palestinian Authority (PA), run by Abbas's West Bank-based Fatah movement, Hamas' bitter rival.
"The international community will initiate the agreements and impose it on Hamas," the Ha'aretz newspaper quoted a senior political source in Jerusalem as saying. "The agreements will be with both the PA and Egypt and then if Hamas will not agree it will pay the price, mostly by even greater isolation."
Israel has suggested the US might help Egypt by sending combat engineers to reinforce the border. As well as EU and PA officials deployed at the Rafah crossing into Egypt, as in the past, it also wants US, French and Arab support for a UN-backed resolution granting Israel the right to respond to any Hamas violations. Above all, it wants to avoid a situation under which Hamas could rearm after a ceasefire, as Lebanon's Hezbullah was able to do soon after the end of the 2006 war.
Under a 2005 agreement, Rafah can only be opened to normal traffic if EU observers and PA forces are at the border, which is also monitored by Israel. But the PA presence ended when Hamas took over Gaza from Fatah in June 2007. The challenge now will be to find a way to allow them back at a time that relations between the two factions are at a nadir.
Western diplomats said the US, EU and Arab League were now looking at a four-point agenda:
• Stopping arms smuggling into Gaza
• Financial support for Egypt in controlling the border and detecting tunnels
• International monitoring, with the UN, EU and Arab forces assisting Egypt
• Reopening of all crossing points into the Gaza Strip - a key Hamas demand.
Further signs of a mounting international backlash against Israel came with an unusally strong condemnation from Saudi Arabia. "The international position is feeble in dealing with unprecedented Israeli violations," said a cabinet statement. "To say that Israeli barbarity is self-defence is to close one's eyes to the history of Israeli occupation and settlement of Palestinian territories, practices of closure and terror, and the massive imbalance in power between the two sides," it said.
Mauritania said it was recalling its ambassador to Tel Aviv for consultations. Egypt and Jordan, the only two other Arab countries which have peace treaties with Israel, have strongly condemned the Gaza offensive.
