Secretary General of the Arab League Amr Moussa announced on Sunday that the land-for-peace Arab peace initiative will be relaunched during an Arab summit scheduled for the end of March in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, but stressed that no changes will be made to the current format.

Last week, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that Israel objects to the initiative's section on the Palestinian refugees, which was not part of the initial Saudi draft, but was added at the 2002 Arab League summit.

Israel was expecting the Arab League to adopt an improved version of the Saudi peace plan at the summit meeting, senior government sources told Haaretz last week.

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"The Arab peace initiative expresses an Arab consensus and will not be redrafted as demanded by some foreign powers," Moussa told the ministers, who were meeting in Cairo ahead of the two-day Arab League summit later this month.

"Maneuvering and watering down (the initiative) will be a strategic mistake," Moussa said. "It perhaps will lead to new bloodshed."

Moussa reiterated that Israel should give back all territories it seized in the 1967 war and allow Palestinian refugees to return.

The 2002 plan calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state and full recognition of Israel in return for an Israeli withdrawal from all territory captured in the Arab-Israeli wars. A later version of the initiative states that Israel should return all Arab land and also allow Palestinian refugees to return.

According to publications in the Arab press in recent weeks, the Arab nations are expected to ratify the existing initiative, and perhaps add some timetables for execution.

Iran denies Saudi report it supports Arab peace initiative

A spokesman for the Iranian presidency on Sunday denied that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had expressed support for the 2002 Arab peace initiative during talks with Saudi officials, as reported by Saudi Arabia's official news agency.

"During the summit, no discussions were held in this regard," Spokesman Ehsan Jahandideh told IRNA, the Iranian news agency.

Under the Saudi peace plan, adopted at an Arab League summit in Beirut in March 2002, Arab states would normalize relations with Israel in exchange for its withdrawal from territory captured in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency, in a report carrying statements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his return to Iran late Saturday following talks with King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, did not mention the initiative.

The Saudi Press Agency reported early Sunday that Ahmadinejad had said during talks that he was in favor of the plan. The report did not say how the agency had learned of this.

IRNA, the Iranian news agency, reported that Ahmadinejad told journalists talks had dealt with the Palestinians situation and developments in Iraq.

"We have good relations with Saudi Arabia and it was necessary to discuss current developments in world of Islam with officials of the country," IRNA quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.


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