Despite overtures by both sides since December, prospects for a resumption of peace talks between Syria and Israel still appear remote due to the two sides' diametrically opposed approaches.

Damascus did not hesitate to dismiss a proposal on Monday from Israeli President Moshe Katsav for Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad to make an unprecedented visit to Jerusalem for negotiations.

The gesture was nothing more than a publicity stunt and a diversion from the land-for-peace principles of the peace talks, which were broken off in January 2000, a senior Syrian official said, quoted by the state news agency SANA.

A Syrian diplomat stressed that Damascus' objective remains the recovery of the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, and that it would not return to the negotiating table "just at any price".

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said negotiations must resume from scratch and laid down as conditions a halt to Syrian support for Palestinian and Lebanese militant groups.

It was Assad, under US pressure since the war that ousted Saddam Hussein in neighbouring Iraq, who set the ball in motion with a call in early December for the Syrian-Israeli track of the Middle East peace process to be revived.

But Israel's response so far, despite calls from within Sharon's own party in support of renewed talks, has been designed to "torpedo the very principles of peace", according to Syria's ruling party newspaper, Al-Baath.

The Sharon government, "with the blind support of the US", has been setting "impossible conditions", according to Ath-Thawra, another official daily in Damascus.

In public, Syrian officials are on record as refusing to abandon the progress made in US-sponsored peace talks between 1996 and 2000 that covered crucial issues such as security arrangements and a normalisation of relations.

But US Senator Bill Nelson, who met Assad over the weekend, told the Haaretz newspaper in Israel that Syria was ready to resume negotiations without any preconditions and, if necessary, to restart from zero.

If Israel insisted, Assad had made clear to him that he had no objections to starting from scratch, Nelson said.

In talks under Bashar's late father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, then Israeli premier Ehud Barak agreed to an almost total Golan withdrawal, save for a strip bordering the east bank of the Sea of Galilee, Israel's main reservoir of fresh water.

But Damascus rejected the proposal, wanting the return of all of the strategic plateau, which Israel annexed in 1981 and offering full peace in return for a full withdrawal.

For Israel, however, a deal with Syria would entail the dismantling of the Jewish settlements there. Instead, the right-wing Sharon government at the end of last month announced plans to build hundreds more homes on the Golan.

A former Israeli ambassador to Washington, Itamar Rabinovich, an expert on the Syria file who took part in the US-brokered talks, said in comments carried by the Arab press this week that both sides needed to make "goodwill gestures". – Sapa-AFP.