OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, Jan 10: US President George W. Bush, hardening his tone towards Israel on Thursday, called for an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian and Arab lands and pushed for a peace treaty to be signed within a year to create the state of Palestinian.

The United States rarely uses the politically charged word “occupation” to describe Israel’s hold on lands captured in a 1967 war. It is a term Palestinians seeking a state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip employ frequently to describe their plight.

“The establishment of the state of Palestine is long overdue. The Palestinian people deserve it,” Bush said in a statement he read to reporters in a Jerusalem hotel.

Bush’s language, after he travelled to the West Bank city of Ramallah past Israeli checkpoints and settlements, could cause political pain to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whose right-wing coalition partners usually bridle at such remarks.

“There should be an end to the occupation that began in 1967,” Bush said. He had earlier met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and visited Bethlehem, also in the West Bank.

Bush pressed the Palestinians to rein in militants. He said any negotiations must also ensure Israel has “secure, recognised and defensible borders” alongside a “viable, contiguous, sovereign and independent” Palestine.

Challenging sceptics of his new push for peace on the first US presidential visit to Ramallah, he told a news conference with President Abbas: “I believe it’s going to happen, that there will be a signed peace treaty by the time I leave office.”

Critics say Bush, who steps down in January 2009, has failed to deploy Washington’s full weight in seeking to end the 60-year-old conflict during his first seven years in office.

A summit he hosted at Annapolis in November ended a hiatus in negotiations since 2000. But many doubt differences can be overcome now, as Bush seeks to burnish his legacy in the Middle East after five years of war in Iraq. Olmert is politically weak and Abbas cannot control the Gaza Strip, which Hamas seized in June.

Bush reiterated in the keynote statement a vision of territorial compromise he first charted in a policy letter to then-Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon in 2004.

—Agencies