JERUSALEM: Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman arrived in Israel on Wednesday for his first round of talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and top officials in his government.
Suleiman, on the first visit by a high-level Egyptian official to Israel since the hawkish Netanyahu took office on April 1, was meeting Defense Minister Ehud Barak in a Jerusalem hotel, Barak s office said.
Foreign ministry officials could not say whether Suleiman would also hold talks with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, as announced by a senior aide a few days ago.
Egypt has an uneasy relationship with Lieberman, a firebrand nationalist who said last year that President Hosni Mubarak could go to hell if he continued to refuse to visit the Jewish state.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said earlier this month that he would not shake Lieberman s hand.
Israel has gone out of its way to play down any tension with its most important Arab ally over the new foreign minister, whose cabinet role has raised concerns over the future of Middle East peacemaking.
Lieberman has also suggested bombing Egypt s Aswan Dam in the event of war between the two countries, which signed a landmark peace deal in 1979.
Egypt has played a crucial role in recent years in efforts to broker a number of ceasefires between the Jewish state and the Islamist Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip.
Suleiman has also acted as go-between in negotiations between the two sides for a prisoner swap in which Israel would free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in return for Gilad Shalit, a soldier captured by Gaza militants in a deadly cross-border raid in June 2006.
Netanyahu on Wednesday appointed the head of the Shin Beth internal security service, Yuval Diskin, as his special envoy in the prisoner negotiations after the previous envoy Ofer Dekel stepped down on Tuesday following 30 months in the job. -AFP
