Seeking Arab nations' support for an American peace initiative, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert won his government's approval Monday to free 441 Palestinian prisoners and reaffirmed a pledge to tear down dozens of unauthorized Jewish settlement outposts in the West Bank.Olmert's gestures at a contentious Cabinet meeting were aimed at drawing high-level Arab delegates to a peace conference next week, although they fell short of what Palestinian and Arab leaders had demanded - a freeze on all settlement growth and a larger prisoner release.
President Bush and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have tentatively planned the conference for next Tuesday in Annapolis, Md., to launch the first substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in seven years, with the goal of a Palestinian state by the end of Bush's presidency.
In months of shuttle diplomacy, Rice has failed to narrow differences on the conflict's big issues - the new state's borders, control of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes at the time of Israel's creation in 1948.
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