Cheney calls for painful concessions for Mideast peace

By Tabassum Zakaria

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said on Sunday that achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace would require painful concessions from both sides.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who met Cheney at the Palestinian Authority's Muqata headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said Israeli settlement expansion, military checkpoints and raids were blocking progress towards peace.

The two convened shortly after the Palestinian leader's Fatah faction and its Hamas Islamist rival signed a Yemeni-sponsored reconciliation deal vowing to revive direct talks.

Neither Cheney nor Abbas commented publicly on the agreement.

Hamas, which opposes Abbas's peace efforts, seized the Gaza Strip from Fatah in fighting last June. Differences remained over the future of the territory of 1.5 million Palestinians despite the factions' willingness to try to mend fences.

Speaking to reporters, Cheney said achieving U.S. President George W. Bush's vision of a Palestinian state living alongside a secure Israel, "will require tremendous efforts at the negotiating table and painful concessions on both sides".

"It will also require a determination to defeat those who are committed to violence and who refuse to accept the basic right of the other side to exist," said Cheney, on his first visit as vice president to the Palestinian territories.

The United States and other Western countries have said there could no contacts with Hamas until it recognised Israel, renounced violence and accepted existing interim peace deals.