Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday ruled out negotiations with Israel as long as it refuses to freeze settlement building, but did not specify if he would agree to indirect talks.

"We will not accept negotiations as long as settlements continue," Abbas told reporters in Cairo after more than one hour of talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit urged the international community on Wednesday to call an "end game" in Middle East peace talks and set clear deadlines for reaching Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

"The Egyptian view is as follows: Let's agree on an end game," Abul Gheit said after talks in Sofia with his Bulgarian counterpart Nikolay Mladenov.

Marine experts on Wednesday quizzed witnesses to shark attacks as beaches at Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh remained closed after a woman was torn apart by a shark.

South Sinai governor Mohammed Shosha told Agence France Presse authorities would announce later in the day whether they would reopen beaches which are visited each year by between three and four million tourists.

The Middle East peace process lay in tatters Wednesday after Washington admitted defeat in its efforts to secure an Israeli freeze on settlement building, the Palestinians' condition for resuming talks.

Speaking late on Tuesday, U.S. officials admitted top-level efforts to coax Israel into imposing new curbs on West Bank settlement construction had gone nowhere, prompting Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to declare a crisis in peace efforts but backslapping among Israeli hardliners.

Israel carried out two air raids on the Gaza Strip early Wednesday without causing any casualties, Palestinian security officials said.

The attacks came after Palestinian militants fired two projectiles into southern Israel from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Tuesday.

The death toll from northern Israel's massive forest fire rose to 42 on Monday as Haifa's police chief, Ahuva Tomer, died in hospital of her burn injuries, public radio reported.

Tomer, 52, one of Israel's few female police chiefs, died in Rambam hospital in the Mediterranean city of Haifa where she worked, the radio reported, citing medical sources.

Israel's plan to pull its troops out of northern Ghajar, a disputed village on the flashpoint border with Lebanon, is likely to prove more of a headache than a political victory for Beirut, experts say.

"The people of Ghajar do not want to be part of Lebanon," said Timur Goksel, former senior adviser of the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), of the village's 2,200 residents -- none of whom is Lebanese.

Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal al-Moqdad stated that Lebanese-Syrian ties "cannot be normal if the situation in Lebanon is not normal," reported the Kuwaiti al-Rai newspaper on Sunday.

He said: "Syria will not interfere in Lebanon in the interests of any side and the Lebanese officials are responsible for their country."

Iran will never use force against its Muslim neighbors, its foreign minister told a conference on Middle East security on Saturday, after the United States said Arab states were worried by Tehran's suspected attempts to acquire nuclear weapons.

And in a keynote address to the conference, Jordan's King Abdullah II said Israeli-Palestinian peace talks must be rescued from collapse to ensure regional and world stability.

Saudi King Abdullah's second round of back surgery in New York was successful and he will begin rehabilitation, the royal court announced late Friday.

The surgery "was completed successfully and now the king will begin a second phase of physiotherapy," the court said in a statement on the official SPA news agency.