Accord on Key Issues Eludes Mideast Delegates

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators left Washington on Saturday without reaching agreement on critical issues dividing them, dealing a serious blow to President Clinton’s hopes of reaching a peace accord before he leaves office.

In a half-hour White House meeting with Clinton concluding the most serious peace talks in months, negotiators could not hammer out accord on the status of Jerusalem, security, refugees or borders.

“Inevitably differences remain” between the two sides despite nearly a week of intense talks at Bolling Air Force Base in southeast Washington, Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami told reporters in a brief statement on the White House driveway.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that, although progress had been made, “major gaps still exist.” He said that he would report to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and that a decision on the next step might be made by Wednesday.

White House spokesman P. J. Crowley told reporters later that Clinton “made some suggestions to the parties based on what we heard from them” and expected to hear back from the two sides by midweek.

Administration officials had hoped that the talks would lead to a three-way summit before Clinton’s term ends Jan. 20. But they have said that no such meeting can take place unless they are virtually certain of its success. On Saturday, Crowley said that discussion of another U.S.-hosted summit would be premature until there is evidence of significant progress.

Nevertheless, he said: “The president is determined to reach an agreement.”

Options for the next step include dispatching a U.S. envoy to the region or arranging another round of talks.

As has become usual during U.S.-mediated Mideast talks, there were no authoritative reports on the substance of the negotiations Saturday, with U.S. spokespersons refusing to discuss what went on at the table and Israeli and Palestinian sources leaking information that served their own purposes.

Senior Israeli officials said negotiators from their side had offered some “interesting new ideas” with regard to the future status of Jerusalem. And Ben-Ami was reported to have told American Jewish leaders during a conference call Friday that Israel was prepared to surrender sovereignty over the Temple Mount, a holy site in Jerusalem revered by both Arabs and Jews, as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

But on the same day, Palestinian negotiators accused the Israelis of pulling back from an earlier offer to share sovereignty over parts of Jerusalem. Both sides claim the city, which is holy to Muslims, Christians and Jews, as the center of their homeland.

Israeli officials also said the Palestinian negotiators sent to Washington were, in contrast to Ben-Ami, not high-level officials with the authority to strike a deal. They said Saturday that two demands that are anathema to the Israelis--the Palestinians’ insistence that their people be given the right to return to their ancestral villages in what is now the state of Israel and that the returnees be given claim to properties in those areas--have not been resolved.

“I would not say that the moment is gone,” one Israeli official said. “We came to these talks with some new ideas designed to move the process forward. But those are fundamental issues the Palestinians have to move on. If they expect Israel to move forward on other issues that are important to them, we expect a quid pro quo.”

Arriving in Jordan on Saturday to meet with King Abdullah II, Arafat told reporters that Palestinian negotiators would not make concessions on either of the issues surrounding the return of Palestinian refugees. He added that there were “many obstacles” in the negotiations, the Associated Press reported.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger and John Podesta, the White House chief of staff, attended Saturday’s White House meeting.

Then the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met with U.S. mediator Dennis B. Ross and other U.S. officials. The negotiators had also met with Albright and Clinton earlier in the week.