WASHINGTON – The chairman of the Palestinian Authority tomorrow will seek nothing less than a statement from President Bush announcing that he endorses the commencement of direct, final-status negotiations with Israel, according to the director of political affairs for the PLO in Washington, Nabil Abuznaid.

“We want a clear statement from the president on the second phase of the road map. We need to know if this is the end of a process or the beginning,” Mr. Abuznaid said, referring to a peace plan floated in 2002 by America, Europe, Russia, and the United Nations and endorsed by both sides of the conflict. “We need a signal to start the negotiations for final status.”

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will be feted by the White House and congressional leaders tomorrow in his first trip to America since Israel’s withdrawal of soldiers and settlers from Gaza. In light of the hurricanes in the South, the leak probe in Washington, and the constitutional referendum in Iraq, the White House has been less focused on events in the Holy Land. The meeting will provide a glimpse into the administration’s thinking on how to proceed diplomatically after Prime Minister Sharon’s withdrawal in July.

On Monday, Mr. Abbas said he expected that Israel-Palestinian security talks would resume soon. They were frozen after Palestinian gunmen murdered three Israeli teenagers outside the Gush Etzion settlement block. In Paris on Monday, Mr. Abbas condemned those attacks, saying, “These events harm the cease-fire and the calm that we have respected.”

While Mr. Abbas will be seeking American pressure to restart final status talks on creating a Palestinian state, diplomatic sources here say most of the meetings will be focused on how the Palestinian Authority can make good on its promise to disarm Hamas and other terrorist organizations. One Arab diplomat told The New York Sun that Mr. Abbas is prepared to ask for assistance in disarming terrorists before municipal elections scheduled for December.

Mr. Abuznaid said yesterday of Mr. Abbas, “He is not fighting Hamas, he’s talking to Hamas to convince them to drop their arms, but also he lacks the means. He does not have the arms if it’s needed. He should get that chance.”

Mr. Abuznaid said that the strategy for now is to give Hamas a choice between “bullets and ballots.”

Israel and the Bush administration have said that for now they oppose the inclusion of Hamas in municipal elections in December or the parliamentary elections scheduled for January 25.

“Israel believes the Palestinian Authority has the means to disarm these organizations, and every day that pass es without them taking these steps will only make it more difficult as the terrorist organizations become more empowered and emboldened,” the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, David Siegel, said. “The gunning down with impunity of teenagers in broad daylight has to stop; it can’t be business as usual. Israel can’t tolerate it; no country in its right mind would tolerate it.”

“The John Batchelor Show,” on ABC Radio, aired an interview Monday with a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committee – a federation of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad – in which he threatened to continue attempts to assassinate Prime Minister Sharon. The organization last month claimed credit for shooting Qassam rockets into Mr. Sharon’s ranch, and is widely believed to have been responsible for gunning down American diplomats on the road to Gaza in 2003.

The director of the American Jewish Congress’s Council for World Jewry, David Twersky, said yesterday, “If Abbas would proceed to implement a plan to disarm Hamas, it would cause a bigger revolution in the Israeli-Palestinian situation even than the Gaza withdrawal. The Israeli body politic would have to respond, but so would the Bush administration, which has been maintaining that there is no diplomatic progress until terror groups are disarmed.”