Habib, Hussein Meet in Bid to Renew Mideast Peace Talks

Veteran diplomat Philip C. Habib met with Jordan’s King Hussein in Amman on Saturday as a special envoy of President Reagan, part of an unannounced U.S. effort to restart the Middle East peace process.

Habib’s mission, confirmed by the State Department after it was disclosed in a dispatch by the official Jordanian news agency, came after nearly two months of violence in the Israeli-occupied territories and after intensive Washington discussions in recent days with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and representatives of Israel’s rival government leaders, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

State Department officials said Habib’s objective is to bring Hussein into the process as Secretary of State George P. Shultz tries a new tack in diplomatic explorations of the future of the strife-torn West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“The United States has decided it can’t consider 1988 as a dead year in Middle East diplomacy. My impression is (that) it is about to enter a very active phase,” said a foreign official who conferred with Shultz last week. Shultz selected the just-completed Mubarak state visit to Washington as “the jumping-off point” of a new diplomatic initiative, the official added.

Shultz’s inclination, according to remarkably similar accounts from the foreign official and Shultz’s senior aides, is to explore transitional arrangements to improve the living conditions and increase self-government and freedom for the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.

These issues were addressed in depth under U.S. leadership following the 1978 Camp David accords in the late stages of the Jimmy Carter Administration, but no agreements were reached.

State Department officials said they had no substantive report from Habib following his meeting with Hussein, but that a full-scale debriefing session is planned for Monday, when Habib is to be back in Washington.