Earlier in the week, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced she would soon meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to explore ways to accelerate peacemaking and establish a Palestinian state. Date and venue were not announced.

"Two years are enough to conclude a detailed agreement," Sneh told a conference at the Netanya Academic College.

"We should discuss, maybe for six months, the principles, and move forward about the details of final status agreement," Sneh said.

Olmert and Abbas held their first substantive meeting on Dec. 23 in an effort to get long-stalled peace talks moving again. Olmert pledged, in a confidence-building gesture, to ease travel restrictions on Palestinians, and to transfer $100 million (€77.47 million) in frozen funds to the Palestinians, whose finances have deteriorated sharply over the past year because of an international boycott of the militantly anti-Israel Hamas government.

But travel restrictions remain onerous, and nearly a month later, less than $10 million (€7.7 million) in frozen funds have been released.

Abbas, whose Fatah faction is locked in a bloody power struggle with Hamas, needs the concessions to prove to the Palestinian people that there are benefits to engaging Israel in dialogue designed to lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Nearly four years ago, Israel and the Palestinians accepted the internationally backed "road map" peace plan that was to have led to Palestinian statehood by 2005. But the plan foundered soon after it was presented. Both sides have failed to carry out obligations that were to be fulfilled before negotiations on a final deal could be launched.

Also in Netanya, the head of the European mission monitoring operations at the Egypt-Gaza border urged Israel to stop restricting operations there, saying disruptions only promote "extremism and terror."

Israel, citing security alerts, has kept the Rafah terminal _ Gaza's main gateway to the outside world _ closed for about 80 percent of the time since Palestinian militants from Gaza kidnapped an Israeli soldier in June.

On Thursday, the head of the European monitors, Italian Lt. Gen. Pietro Pistolese, said it was counterproductive to deprive Gaza's 1.4 million people of access to the rest of the world.

"It is vital that there is a return to normal operations at Rafah as soon as possible," Pistolese said.

Keeping the border closed "only only encourages more people to resort to extremism and terror," he said.

At the same gathering, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, who arrived in the region in December 2005 with a mandate to help reform the Palestinian security forces, said his team was here for the long haul.

"We are not going away anytime soon," Dayton said in a rare public appearance.

Dayton said he works on projects designed to produce tangible results, such as improving security at the Karni cargo crossing between Israel and Gaza.

The crossing, Gaza's lifeline, has been closed repeatedly by Israel because of security warnings; the crossing has been the frequent target of attacks by Palestinian militants.

A senior Western official said security at the crossing has improved significantly with the gradual deployment of Abbas' elite Presidential Guard, starting in November.

In December, the number of trucks leaving Gaza increased by 20 percent, to more than 1,000. The movement is still far below the minimum 400-a-day quota outlined in the November 2005 agreement on Gaza's border, reached after Israel withdrew from the coastal strip.

In other news, Israeli troops in the West Bank city of Nablus shot dead a Palestinian gunman in an early morning gunfight, Palestinian security officials and paramedics said. The Israeli army said troops operating in the city shot an armed man, but had no information on his condition.