Mideast Leaders Agree to Restart Peace Negotiations : Diplomacy: Unprecedented summit with Egypt and Jordan gets talks ‘back on track’ as Israel and the PLO promise to meet again next week.

CAIRO — The leaders of Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization in an unprecedented four-way summit Thursday agreed to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks next week, according to a spokesman.

“I believe the Palestinian-Israeli peace process is back on track,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Amir Moussa told reporters after the summit concluded late Thursday night, after five hours of talks.

Moussa said Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat will resume negotiations next Thursday on expanding Palestinian authority throughout the West Bank. But he also said Rabin and Arafat reached no agreement on lifting the closure that Israel imposed on the West Bank and Gaza Strip on Jan. 22, after two suicide bombers killed 21 Israelis at a bus stop.

“These are subjects for future negotiations,” he said.

The leaders issued a communique pledging that they will fight “terror and violence” and reaffirming their commitment to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Moussa read the communique at Ittahadiya Palace, where the talks were held.

In Washington, a senior State Department official described the talks as “unprecedented and historic.” He said the summit should “re-inject movement into the process.”

He said the foreign ministers of Israel, Egypt and Jordan, plus a foreign-policy spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, will meet in Washington, probably Feb. 12, “to find ways of implementing these agreements.”

The United States, unrepresented in Cairo even by an observer, sought to maintain its status as primary mediator in the Middle East peace process. The official said Washington conferred closely with Egypt and Israel before the summit was announced.

After the Jan. 22 attack, Israel effectively suspended its negotiations with the Palestinians on extending Palestinian self-rule. Before leaving Israel for Cairo on Thursday, Rabin said the Palestinians would have to show determination in fighting terrorism before Israel would resume negotiations.

The Palestinian self-governing authority’s ability to stop attacks on Israelis “will decide more than anything both the speed and possibility of progress in implementing the solution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” Rabin told members of his Labor Party.

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The senior State Department official said Washington believes that the Palestinians “are making efforts” to stop terrorism originating in territories under their control, “but they could do more.”

The summit was the brainchild of Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Both men, aides say, were eager to reassure the Israeli public that peace talks can still move forward.

Mubarak issued the invitations to Jordan’s King Hussein, Rabin and Arafat to hold the first-ever meeting at a time when support for peace negotiations is shrinking among Israelis and Palestinians.

Peres billed the get-together as the first step toward a “coalition for peace” to combat the political extremism that he said threatens to undermine Israel’s efforts to reconcile with the Palestinians and sign peace treaties with all its Arab neighbors.

Palestinian officials said Arafat was less than enthusiastic about the meeting, believing that it was aimed more at bolstering Rabin’s sagging domestic popularity than at achieving concrete political gains that would help the embattled Palestinian leader.

Arafat is dealing with an increasingly restive public that has seen few results from the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords.

The Palestinians complain that Israel has failed to release enough Palestinian prisoners, to open safe passages between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho and to avoid imposing measures that penalize masses of Palestinians--such as the closure of the West Bank and Gaza.

But Arafat left Thursday’s summit without winning any concessions from Rabin.

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For Rabin “the photograph is the main thing” he would secure from the four-way meeting, political analyst Menachem Shalev wrote in Maariv, a popular Hebrew daily, on Thursday.

Arafat, Rabin and Hussein met individually with Mubarak on Thursday, then joined him after sundown for the iftar --the meal with which Muslims break their daylong fasts during the month of Ramadan--before beginning their four-way talks. Rabin sat next to Hussein and across from Mubarak and the khaki-clad Arafat in an ornate conference room of the palace.

Absent from the meeting was Syrian President Hafez Assad, whom Mubarak did not invite.

Assad has criticized both Arafat and Hussein for signing separate peace treaties with Israel, and has urged other Arab states to avoid normalizing relations with the Jewish state until Israel achieves peace with Syria.

Israeli-Syrian negotiations are deadlocked over Syria’s demand for a speedy, full Israeli withdrawal from the strategic Golan Heights and Israel’s demand that Syria fully normalize relations.

Israel and the PLO signed an agreement on Sept. 13, 1993, that laid the framework for an Israeli withdrawal last May from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho, and the transfer of administrative responsibilities in the two areas to the PLO.

The next steps are supposed to be the redeployment of Israeli troops out of Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank, and Palestinian elections in both the West Bank and Gaza to select an authority that will govern the daily lives of Palestinians until the final status of the territories is decided in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

But a series of deadly suicide bombing attacks by Islamic extremists that have killed dozens of Israelis has forced Rabin to pull back from those negotiations. Under heavy fire not only from his political opposition but also within his own party, Rabin now says that an Israeli redeployment and Palestinian elections are still months away.

Some Labor Party leaders are counseling Rabin to make no further progress in the talks with the Palestinians before the next Israeli elections--which are still nearly two years away.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.