THE US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, stamped her personal seal on Middle East peace overtures yesterday as she arrived in Israel on her first visit to the region since she assumed office last month.

Meetings with Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, last night and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, this morning signalled Washington’s re-engagement and a fresh willingness to push for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The talks, amid a new mood of optimism created by a tacit ceasefire the Palestinian leader has wrung from militant factions, came as the Israeli and Palestinian leaders prepared to meet tomorrow for the first time in more than four years.

“This is a time of optimism because fundamental changes are under way in the Middle East as a whole,” Dr Rice said.

“I most especially want to bring the personal commitment of President Bush and my own personal commitment to this process because this is a time of opportunity and it is a time that we must seize.” She insisted that Israel must make “the hard decisions” to facilitate peace and the creation of a Palestinian state, while the Palestinian leadership must make good on its commitment to end the violence.

The Israeli-Palestinian summit at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, hosted by President Mubarak of Egypt and attended by King Abdullah of Jordan, will mark the Israeli leader’s first meeting with Mr Abbas since he was elected after the death of Yassir Arafat.

The summit will be concerned primarily with the practical steps to be taken to bolster Mr Abbas’s position. Frenetic discussions between senior Israeli and Palestinian security officials in recent days agreed sweeping measures that could lead to the declaration of a formal ceasefire — a vital precursor to a return to the stalled “road map” peace plan.

A second “working meeting” between the two leaders is to be held within a month.

Mr Abbas’s ruling Fatah movement last night reissued a call for a mutual ceasefire with Israel. It was viewed as a bid to strengthen the Palestinian leader in his efforts to coax Islamic militant groups into a truce to obtain more concessions from Israel at tomorrow’s conference.

Dr Rice, after laying a wreath at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem and meeting Silvan Shalom, the Foreign Minister, held a working dinner with Mr Sharon.

He was expected to emphasise that his plan to withdraw from Gaza this summer is vital to any peace efforts. “Ariel Sharon will want Dr Rice to make it clear to the Palestinians that supporting the Gaza disengagement is the only game in town,” Zalman Shoval, a foreign policy adviser to the Prime Minister, said. “But it will be co-ordinated with the Palestinians and not a unilateral process as first envisaged.”

The Israeli Prime Minister was also briefing Dr Rice over gestures that have been agreed before the summit.

Yesterday, the two sides proposed to set up a committee to deal with prisoner releases. Palestinians had been outraged that Israel would not free long-term inmates involved in militant attacks, but Israel backed down, saying that it would free several. In return, the Palestinians said that they would not make it an issue at the summit.

Dr Rice was also expected to hear of Israel’s decision to suspend targeted killings of Palestinian fugitives and the rolling withdrawal from West Bank towns where Palestinian security forces will assume control.

Israel is determined to get across the message that the Palestinians must take a gradualist, pragmatic approach to resolving the conflict rather than attempting to jump to the thorny “final status” issues that could end the process even before it has properly begun.

“We would like to see the US back the Israeli position with regard to the security requirements that the Palestinians must follow and not to try to bypass (the road map to reach “final status” issues) simply because they’ve had elections and deployed some security forces,” Raanan Gissin, a senior adviser to Mr Sharon, said. He emphasised Mr Sharon’s optimism that the summit represented an “historic opportunity not to be missed”.

For her part, Dr Rice was to reiterate Israel’s commitment under the road map to freeze all work on settlements and dismantle unauthorised outposts in the West Bank. Israel maintains that there are only 23, but Peace Now, a group that monitors settlements, says that there are 50 and only a few have been shut down.

She was also expected to raise the route of the controversial West Bank separation barrier. Dr Rice said: “The route of the fence should do everything it can to ease the plight of Palestinians, not contribute to it.”

Dr Rice praised Mr Abbas, saying that she was impressed with the steps he had taken to halt violent attacks but hoped he would continue to do more.

The US hopes its $350 million (£186.5 million) aid package could lead to the viable Palestinian state President Bush said he would strive to create before leaving office in 2009.

“I would not like to put a time-frame on (a Palestinian state),” Dr Rice said. “But I do think we can get to two states living side by side. We have to. The peace of the Middle East demands that there one day be Palestine and Israel living side by side in peace.”

HOW THE ROAD MAP LOST ITS WAY

Failures on both sides made it impossible to move to the next phases of the plan, that called for the building of Palestinian institutions of state so that they could enter talks over the “final status” issues

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