Clinton arrives in Cairo amid Arab backlash

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, facing an Arab backlash over her praise for Israel's offer to ease settlement growth, headed to Cairo on Tuesday for hastily convened talks with President Hosni Mubarak.

Clinton was expected to arrive in the evening and go straight into a meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit and intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, Egyptian and US officials said.

She was to meet Mubarak on Wednesday morning to discuss Washington's faltering efforts to revive the Middle East peace process.

Abul Gheit, according to the official MENA news agency, said Clinton had asked for the meeting with Mubarak to discuss her administration's efforts to revive Palestinian-Israeli talks, adding that the peace process was "now passing into a critical stage."

On Monday, Abul Gheit told Clinton in a phone conversation that Egypt supported the Palestinian stance, which refuses negotiations with Israel before a complete halt to settlement building, the agency reported.

Cairo has been mediating between the rival factions, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah in the West Bank, who have been split since Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007.

Clinton extended her regional trip after she was criticised for praising as "unprecedented" a pledge by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to limit settlement growth, steps that fall far short of previous US demands for a complete halt to all settlement activity.

She also called for a speedy resumption of peace talks that were suspended during the Gaza war at the turn of the year, despite the Palestinian insistence that must Israel freeze settlement activity first.

Clinton later clarified her comments to say that Washington still considers the settlements to be illegal and admitted she could have spoken more clearly.

"I think President (Barack) Obama was absolutely clear. He wanted a halt to all settlement activity," she said in an interview with Al-Jazeera television.

"Perhaps those of us who work with him and for him could have been clearer in communicating that that is his policy," she said.

A US State Department official denied the stopover in Cairo is aimed at damage control.

Abul Gheit said Cairo wants to hear Clinton's clarifications of her remarks.

"She has given specific clarifications... and we want to listen to the clarifications directly and then assess the situation," MENA quoted him as saying.

Egypt wants guarantees from Washington to assure the Palestinians that the negotiations "will not be used to waste time or be used for achieving Israeli goals," he added.

The settlements in the West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in 1967, are home to nearly 500,000 Israelis and are considered illegal by the international community.

Arab officials accused Obama's administration of reneging on its call earlier this year for a complete end to settlement building and said Clinton's clarifications did not go far enough.

"Clinton's backtracking on her remarks, especially with regard to the partial freeze of settlements, is not sufficient to restart negotiations with Israel," Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP.

Although Washington had said it did not consider a settlement freeze a precondition for the resumption of peace talks, Clinton's comments appeared to place the onus for its effort's success on Abbas.

Abbas, who had held peace talks with Netanyahu's predecessor Ehud Olmert in the absence of a settlement freeze, cannot afford to be seen as succumbing to Israeli pressure, analysts say.

"It's hard for him to backtrack and give Hamas another card, for his popularity to drop domestically," said Imad Gad, an analyst with the Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.

Abbas's popularity dipped after he supported the delay of a UN vote last month on endorsing a report that accused Israel and Hamas of war crimes during the 22-day Gaza war. He went on to endorse a subsequent vote after withering criticism from Hamas and his own party.

Osama Hamdan, a Beirut-based senior official with Hamas, which opposes peace talks with Israel, said Clinton's comments showed that "hopes in Obama were misplaced."