Exerpts: October 17 Press Briefing

Question: The Secretary met this morning with Prime Minister Sharon. There are reports in the region that the President yesterday discussed with Prime Minister Sharon a new roadmap for peace. It must be about the 50th roadmap there is. Is this correct? And if it is, is this something that the Secretary talked about with the Prime Minister this morning before he left?

Mr. Boucher: I will let the White House brief on the President's meetings. The question of a roadmap is one that has been discussed and is being discussed. If you look at the statement that we issued after the Quartet meeting in New York when we talked about the three-phase approach, I think we even used the word roadmap there, the sort of how do you go from the President's vision that he enunciated on June 24th to the actual steps the parties can take to achieve that. And we've made clear there was mutual obligations. So those elements have certainly been discussed throughout Prime Minister Sharon's visit -- the President's vision and how to achieve it. Ambassador Burns is on a trip now. He's at a Quartet meeting in Paris and they are discussing in more detail what you might call the actual roadmap.

In the Secretary's discussions this morning they did talk about the President's vision, steps that we could take, that we were taking to support reform of the Palestinians. They discussed in more detail some of the issues that Prime Minister Sharon had discussed with the President, like tax revenues and how to do that process in a transparent manner that we talked about in the statement yesterday.

They talked in somewhat more detail about humanitarian issues in the Palestinian areas and they also discussed some broader issues of the region. The Secretary actually brought him up to date on North Korea and what was going on with that. They talked about Prime Minister Sharon's visit to Russia, talked about the water situation with Lebanon and generally regional issues, Iraq, things like that.

Question: But I just want to make sure that there is no -- as far as you're aware, there's no new roadmap, a different one than what was discussed by the Quartet and what has been --

Mr. Boucher: No, this is a roadmap as discussed by the Quartet as an object of continuing work and one of things that Ambassador Burns is working on during the course of his trip. Whether that was discussed as a roadmap per se or not in the White House, the kinds of steps, of reform and tax revenues and humanitarian concerns, the kinds of steps necessary to achieve the President's vision were certainly discussed in these meetings.

Question: Of course, that roadmap is incomplete, as you seem to imply. And can you tell us anything about the Paris meeting that took place today? Have you had any kind of readout from it?

Mr. Boucher: They discussed the progress made on the goal of comprehensive Palestinian institutional reform and easing the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian areas, continued their ongoing consultations as part of our consultations with the Quartet, key Arab partners and the parties themselves on the elements of a roadmap. So I think that's about as much detail as we can put to it at this point.

Question: And Burns keeps going?

Mr. Boucher: He keeps going. He gets to Egypt on Friday, goes to Saudi Arabia on Saturday, and I have, I think, somewhere a long list of places where he's going. He's going to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait.

Question: (Inaudible.)

Mr. Boucher: Yes.

Question: Well is he going to address -- the President was pretty strong on the Hezbollah situation yesterday. Can we assume -- in fact, his message was fairly clear that Hezbollah's friends, Syria and Iran, for instance, and probably Lebanon is a Hezbollah friend as well, maybe a passive one. Is Burns going to try to deal with this? I have no idea what the President means when he says he's going to fight terror there, too. What is Burns going to do? Can you tell us if he's going to --

Mr. Boucher: I am sure Assistant Secretary Burns is going to raise the issues of Hezbollah and the, especially in Israel's northern border, as we always do when we talk to Syria and Lebanon, a matter of concern between us and the Israelis. So it's obviously often -- always, I would say, one of the topics we talk about in those places.

Question: And just on the meetings, does he have an intention of seeing Yasser Arafat?

Mr. Boucher: No.

Teri.

Question: New subject?

Question: No. In Gaza today there were up to seven Palestinians, mainly women and children, killed by tank fire. Any comment on the Israeli tank fire? They were just kind of walking down the street, the usual kind of thing.

Mr. Boucher: I don't think I have anything on that particular incident. I hadn't seen the reports when I came out to brief. But I think you know we've made quite clear our concerns in the past several weeks about dozens of civilians that have been killed and the humanitarian institutions that have been struck, and we've reiterated what the President and Secretary have said before: it is essential that Israeli forces take steps to prevent tragic incidents like those that have occurred over the past week or so.