US envoy Mitchell begins Mideast tour, to include Turkey, in Egypt

Mitchell arrives with violence still simmering in the Gaza Strip after Israel ended its 22-day offensive, with one Palestinian shot dead and an Israeli soldier reportedly killed in the latest flare-up on Tuesday.

The U.S. envoy met EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana at Cairo airport before the European envoy departed after talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on shoring up a fragile Gaza ceasefire.

Mitchell will meet Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit later on Tuesday ahead of talks on Wednesday with Mubarak, whose country has been at the vanguard of efforts to negotiate a lasting truce between Israel and Hamas, as well as to reconcile the Islamists with their rivals from Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah faction.

The decision to dispatch a presidential envoy to the Middle East so early in the administration is a sign that U.S. President Barack Obama intends to take a more active approach to the peace process than did his predecessor.

The trip is aimed at bolstering a ceasefire that went into effect in Gaza on Jan. 18 and at tackling the humanitarian crisis in the impoverished Palestinian territory.

In an interview Monday with Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television, Obama said he felt it important to "get engaged right away" in the Middle East. He said he directed Mitchell to talk to "all the major parties involved" and that his administration would craft an approach after that.

"What I told him is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating," Obama said in the interview.

After meeting Mubarak, Mitchell will go on Wednesday to Israel and the West Bank until Friday for talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, a State Department official told AFP, requesting anonymity.

On Saturday, he was to visit Amman before visiting Riyadh on Sunday, the official added. Mitchell is due to stop in Paris on Monday and London on Tuesday. He will also pay a visit to Turkey before returning to Washington.

Ahead of Mitchell's departure, State Department spokesman Robert Wood did not rule out his also traveling to the Gaza Strip, where the recent Israel offensive killed at least 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.

The 75-year-old Mitchell said he did not "underestimate the difficulty" of his assignment when he was named special Middle East envoy last week by Obama.

Mitchell, a Maronite Catholic whose mother was Lebanese, managed to bring together the leaders of Northern Ireland’s religious communities with a mixture of compromise and talks to sign the historic Good Friday agreement in 1998.

His 2001 report on the Israelis and Palestinians called for Israelis to freeze the construction of new settlements and stop shooting at unarmed demonstrators, and for Palestinians to prevent attacks and punish the perpetrators.