Israel and Syria are to resume negotiations on a peace treaty in Washington next week. The agreement to hold the talks follows visits to Damascus and Jerusalem by the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, earlier this week.
Describing it a "significant breakthrough" President Clinton said the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, and the Syrian Foreign Minister, Mr Sarouk Ash-Shara, would meet in Washington to take up the negotiations which have been suspended since 1996. Later the talks would move back to the region.
President Assad would be "very personally involved" in the talks, Mr Clinton said.
He also announced progress in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. He said that Mr Barak and Mr Yasser Arafat were committed to agreeing on a framework agreement by mid-February and on a final-status agreement by next September.
Previously, the Syrian president had insisted on the talks with Israel resuming "from the point" at which they had been suspended. The Israelis and Syrians had been arguing, via third parties, about where exactly they had got to in the previous sessions of talks, with Mr Assad claiming to have won a firm commitment from the late prime minister, Mr Yitzhak Rabin, for a withdrawal from the entire Golan Heights, and the Israeli government insisting that Mr Rabin made no such pledge.
Mr Barak had been hoping to resume the talks immediately on taking office in the summer, and has indicated a greater willingness to compromise on the Golan than evidenced by any previous Israeli government. Ms Albright said yesterday that she now sensed, in Damascus, as in Jerusalem, a new "desire to seize the moment".
The bickering over the terms for resuming talks has obscured the fact that, once the sides do sit down, a peace deal may not be that hard to formulate. Put simply, the Syrians want the entire Golan restored to their sovereignty, and the Israeli government is apparently willing to pay that price, provided appropriate security arrangements are put into place and that Syria uses its troops to guarantee peace on the Israel-Lebanon border.
The Palestinians yesterday rejected Mr Barak's newly declared temporary freeze on settlement construction as insufficient, noting that hundreds of housing units where building work had already begun would still be completed. Mr Barak's pro-settlement coalition partners criticised the freeze, but indicated that they would not precipitate a government crisis over the issue.
A Palestinian official yesterday accused Israel of violating the Wye 2 peace deal by failing to release Palestinian prisoners. Mr Hisham Abdel-Razek, minister of state for prisoners affairs, said Israel had agreed to release a third group of prisoners before Ramadan, which starts today.