CAIRO: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will meet Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Wednesday in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh to discuss efforts to jumpstart stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a statement from the Israeli Embassy in Egypt said. Egypt has been attempting to broker a deal between the two sides for months and the meeting hopes to revive these negotiations as well as put forward new ideas to end the infighting between Palestinian rival parties Hamas and Fatah, which control the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, respectively. Barak, the head of Israel's Labor Party, said a failure to come to a peace deal based on a two-state solution posed a greater threat to Israel than an “Iranian bomb.” “Any other situation, and not an Iranian bomb or any other external threat, is the most serious threat to Israel's future,” Barak said Tuesday before beginning preparations for the Wednesday meeting. Egypt has repeatedly warned of the dangers of Iran and Israel's nuclear programs and has called for a region free of nuclear weapons. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said in recent weeks that Iran's nuclear program is an immediate threat and has warned of possible war with Tehran. “All the attention the international community is giving to the Iranian program must take into account a similar approach to Israel's nuclear capabilities,” Israeli Army Radio on Tuesday night quoted Mubarak as saying. The two leaders plan to discuss the ongoing economic blockade of the Gaza Strip, maintained by both countries since Hamas took control of the territory's security forces three-years-ago, and Egyptian-brokered talks on a prisoner-swap deal between Hamas and Israel, according to Egypt's official MENA news agency. Israeli officials have linked the closure of Gaza's borders to a prisoner-swap deal that could see hundreds of Palestinian prisoners freed in exchange for the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured near the Gaza border in 2006. Egyptian and German-brokered negotiations on such a deal stalled again at the end of last year. Relations between Hamas and Egypt have further deteriorated in recent weeks following reports that Egypt is building an underground steel wall along its border with the Gaza Strip to curtail cross-border smuggling through tunnels. Egypt has never explicitly confirmed it is building such a barrier, but Mubarak this week defended “fortifications along (Egypt's) eastern border” as a matter of “national sovereignty,” and “national security,” saying they were not open to debate. BM
