New York: Upset over the continued violence in the West Asia, an overwhelmingly majority of Israelis want their government to hold direct talks with Hamas to bring the situation under control, a media report said today.

In a recent Haaretz-Dialog poll 64 per cent of respondents including several security officials, academics and ordinary people favoured such talks, Newsweek reports in the upcoming issue, adding that even among those from the hawkish Likud bloc, the idea was backed by 48 per cent.

Israelis, it said, are fed up with what they see as a failed Gaza policy. Hamas's rocket attacks keep spoiling the peace efforts of moderate President Mahmoud Abbas, and Israeli's retaliatory strikes in Gaza have backfired.

Public opinion, the report said, was hit hard earlier this month when Israeli raids in Gaza Strip killed more than 130 Palestinians, mostly women and children.

"Hamas is not going to disappear," Newsweek quotes Shlomo Brom, a former Israeli military chief of strategic planning, as saying. Brom advocates indirect negotiations.

Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal had told Newsweek last year that his organisation was open to direct talks, as long as there were no preconditions.

But the magazine said high-profile meetings are all but unthinkable. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, his popularity hovering in the single digits, doesn t dare alienate the right-wing parties that are keeping him in power.

Since seizing control in Gaza last June, the organisation has split into a pack of independent power bases, the report said.
Source : PTI