ALGIERS, April 14 (Reuters) - The U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, met the president of Algeria on Tuesday as part of a push to enlist Arab support for efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Mitchell, on his first visit to the region since the right-leaning government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took office, will also visit Egypt and the Gulf and meet officials from Israel and the Palestinian territories. After talks with Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Mitchell said: "We count on his advice and opinions to pursue the mission we have to conduct in the region." He was quoted by the official Algerian news agency APS. A State Department spokesman said last week that Mitchell would use his trip to the region to discuss the next steps toward resuming talks on a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians. Avigdor Lieberman, foreign minister in Netanyahu's government, has said Israel is not bound by an earlier deal to start talks on establishing a Palestinian state. Negotiations on Palestinian statehood have been stalled since Israel began a campaign of attacks on Gaza in December. Earlier on Tuesday Mitchell, a former U.S. senator who mediated in the Northern Ireland peace process, was in neighbouring Morocco, where he had talks with Foreign Minister Taieb Fassi Fihri. (Additional reporting by Tom Pfeiffer in Rabat; Writing by Christian Lowe; Editing by Jonathan Wright)
Palestinian students supporting the Fatah movement flash victory-signs as they take part in an election campaign for the student council at the Birzeit University campus in the West Bank city of ...
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