GAZA CITY, 18 August 2006 — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said yesterday that he and Arab allies were working on a plan to revive the Mideast peace process. He also announced that armed Palestinian groups had agreed to stop all actions that might give Israel a pretext for attacks.

“We are in consultation with Arab countries and friends to present a plan based on international legitimacy to the UN General Assembly in order to revive the peace process,” Abbas said in a speech in Gaza City.

“It is unacceptable that the peace process remains in this state,” he told a graduation ceremony for new recruits of presidential guards, but gave no details on the initiative.

The Middle East peace process has been stagnant for years and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said that he intends to set his country’s borders with the Palestinians unilaterally by withdrawing from most of the occupied West Bank but annexing the largest Jewish settlements on Arab territory. “A solution can only come through negotiation. We will never accept the imposition of a unilateral solution, whatever it is,” said Abbas.

About a Palestinian embargo on attacks, the president said: “Yesterday all factions met and agreed on calm and stopping all actions that may give others a pretext to attack us.”

Khader Habib, a political leader of the Islamic Jihad group, said there had been a “general tendency” among most of the factions that attended Wednesday’s meeting with Abbas to halt rocket attacks. He said that while Islamic Jihad would not be part of any formal deal to cease firing rockets, the group would not violate any agreement reached by other factions to stop the attacks.

A Palestinian official close to the talks said factions would not necessarily announce a cease-fire deal but would likely halt their attacks if Israel did the same.

The governing Hamas movement said calm would depend on Israel halting its own attacks in the Palestinian territories.

To complicate matters, Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian yesterday near the Al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. He was shot near the border between the Palestinian territory and Israel, and died of his wounds before medics were allowed to reach the site of the shooting, Palestinian medical sources said.