JERUSALEM, March 30: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday secured an Israeli pledge to remove 50 West Bank roadblocks to improve the daily lives of Palestinians and reinvigorate Middle East peace talks.

The move was included in a package of steps Israel announced following a three-way meeting between Rice, Defence Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad.

Rice won the Israeli promise during her second trip to the region in less than a month as she sought to advance faltering peace negotiations relaunched at a US conference in November.

She later travelled on to Amman and went into talks with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

On a shuttle mission, Rice was to hold a working dinner with Jordan’s King Abdullah II later the same day and return to Jerusalem to meet for a second time with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday.

She is also due to hold a second round of talks with Abbas later on Monday before winding up her mission.

Israel “will remove some 50 barriers to allow vehicle movement between the towns of Jenin, Tulkarem, Qalqilya and Ramallah,” the Israeli defence ministry said earlier.

The measure affects a fraction of the more than 500 roadblocks and checkpoints the army operates across the West Bank, but Israel said it will examine the possibility of removing further roadblocks by May.

Fayyad hailed the move, saying “we accept these measures as acts to improve the people’s lives and to strengthen the ability to work and build our state.” The defence ministry said Palestinian security forces loyal to Abbas would deploy 700 police in the Jenin area in the northern West Bank, but that “overall security responsibility will remain in Israel’s hands.”

Israel also agreed to ease travel restrictions for 1,500 Palestinians and increase Palestinian work permits in Israel in a bid to rehabilitate the Palestinian economy.

Speaking to reporters after the three-way meeting, Rice said the removal of the roadblocks would start “very, very soon.” ”What we have to do is to have meaningful progress toward a better life for the Palestinian people, for economic viability for Palestinians even as we move for the establishment of a state,” she had said earlier.

Rice began her visit on Saturday with a working dinner with Olmert and on Sunday had breakfast with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who acknowledged the importance of improving the Palestinian economy.

“Israel and the Palestinians understand both that the Palestinians’ economy is part of our interest and Israel’s security is part of the Palestinians’ interest,” Livni told reporters at a press conference with Rice.

Peace talks were revived in November after a seven-year hiatus, with both leaders vowing to try to ink an accord by the end of 2008.

But negotiations have since made little visible progress, hampered by Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, a deadly attack on a Jewish religious school in Jerusalem, and Gaza violence.

Abbas on Saturday accused Israel of splitting the Palestinian territories into isolated cantons to prevent the creation of a state.

“The solution which Israel is designing consists of a group of cantons on a land separated by settlements, the separation wall and roadblocks,” Abbas said at the Arab summit in Damascus.—AFP