In what is seen as a major victory for Syria and Iran, Hezbollah and its allies are being guaranteed a two-thirds majority in Lebanon’s parliament, just as Israel and Syria are announcing talks concerning the fate of the Golan Heights.

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In Doha, Qatar, Arab League foreign ministers announced an agreement yesterday to end Lebanon’s 18-month political impasse, which has threatened to reignite the country’s civil war. The pact includes no reference to the U.N. Security Council’s demand that non-state militias disarm and ensures for Hezbollah and its allies a parliamentary majority. Israel and Syria’s announcement of indirect peace talks through Turkish intermediaries, meanwhile, is sparking allegations that Prime Minister Olmert is seeking to deflect attention from a fund-raising scandal at home.

Headlines in Israel alternated between reports on the Israel-Syria announcement, made simultaneously yesterday morning in Ankara, Jerusalem, and Damascus, and news that state investigators probing corruption allegations against Mr. Olmert have secured new and compelling evidence against him, including documentation from the computer files of one of his former confidants, Shula Zaken. Investigators said the new evidence bolsters their allegation that the prime minister took bribes from a Long Island businessman, Morris Talansky.

“Nothing in Israeli public life these days is unrelated to the investigation,” a former Israeli ambassador to Washington who led the Israeli-Syrian negotiations in the 1990s, Itamar Rabinovitz, said. “There is a discrepancy between the drama generated by the news and the prospect” of real peace, he told The New York Sun.

Washington’s lukewarm response to the announcement amounts to “virtual opposition” to the talks, he added.

“This decision was undertaken by Israel,” the White House press secretary, Dana Perino, said. “We were not surprised by it and we do not object to it.”

Along with France and other Western allies of Israel, America has long sought to isolate Syria diplomatically, concerned over the Assad regime’s strong ties with Iran and its meddling in Iraq and Lebanon, as well as its support for groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, which the Bush administration has called terrorist organizations.

“This is a dark day,” a member of the Israeli Knesset, Yuval Steinitz of the Likud Party, told the Sun. “In the middle of an international effort to pressure Syria in order to salvage whatever remains of Lebanon, Israel is extending its hand to Assad,” the president of Syria.

Mr. Steinitz said Syria, “an integral part of the axis of evil,” does not really want the Golan, which Israel captured in the Six-Day War of 1967, “but Assad will take it if the international community allows him to also annex Lebanon.”

In Beirut, Hezbollah promised to allow the election of a new Lebanese president as early as this week. The Shiite group is funded by both Iran and Syria.

“It is always better to talk than to shoot,” Mr. Olmert said at a conference on education in Tel Aviv. Israel will need to make “painful concessions,” the prime minister said, referring to the Golan.

Turkish mediators have reportedly been used before as a secret channel between Damascus and Jerusalem, but yesterday the news first broke publicly in official announcements by the three governments. Mr. Olmert’s aides Yoram Turbovitz and Shalom Turjeman have been in Ankara since Monday, negotiating through Turkish government officials with their Syrian counterparts, according to Israeli press reports.

“We received commitments for a withdrawal from the Golan to the June 4, 1967, line,” the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, told Agence France-Presse.

In the 1990s, Prime Ministers Rabin, Barak, and Netanyahu of Israel conducted negotiations with the Syrian president’s late father, Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000. In those talks, Israelis “deliberately avoided the word ‘commitment'” on a withdrawal from the Golan, Mr. Rabinovitz, who led the talks for Rabin in 1994, said.

Two-thirds of Israelis are opposed to withdrawal from the Golan Heights, according to several polls. Officials in Jerusalem yesterday said the indirect talks in Ankara are based on the framework laid out at the 1991 Madrid conference, which included no direct reference to the Golan.

Longtime advocates of negotiations with Syria, such as a former director of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Alon Liel, immediately congratulated Mr. Olmert. Mr. Liel, who has said he conducted secret negotiations — with Mr. Olmert’s knowledge — through unofficial Syrian channels, has long argued that Syria’s “unnatural” alliance with Iran can be broken and Mr. Assad can be convinced to join an alliance of pro-Western Middle Eastern regimes such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

But earlier this month, Mr. Assad told the Italian magazine L’espresso that he would not cut off relations with Hezbollah and Iran, noting that Tehran is an old ally of his country and that cutting ties with the country’s ruling mullahs was “irrelevant” to reviving peace talks with Israel.

The ties between Shiite Iran and Mr. Assad’s Alawite clan, which rules Syria, are based on a deep religious affinity, the president of the Washington-based pro-democracy Reform Party of Syria, Farid Ghadry, said, pointing to relations that date back to before the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.

“Iran and Syria want to say they control the Middle East,” he said, adding that to achieve that, Syria needs to control Lebanon while showing the Arab world it can get its land back from Israel.