PARIS — Prime Minister Olmert said a peace agreement with the Palestinian Arabs is closer than ever and that he’s “serious” about pursuing a settlement with Syria.

“There are obstacles and disagreements, but we were never so close to the possibility of reaching an agreement as we are now,” Mr. Olmert said at a joint news conference in Paris today with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and President Sarkozy of France at a European Union-Mediterranean summit.

Messrs. Olmert and Abbas are pressing forward with negotiations as they struggle with domestic political troubles. Mr. Olmert is being investigated over corruption allegations. Mr. Abbas has been weakened since last year’s takeover of the Gaza Strip by the rival Hamas group, which expelled his Fatah movement.

“As much as both leaders really need an agreement, I don’t think either has the political backing at home to pursue the kind of dramatic policy that will bridge all the rifts,” the head of research at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, Anat Kurtz, said in a telephone interview.

President Mubarak of Egypt, in his opening remarks to the summit leaders, attributed past failed attempts at cooperation between Mediterranean nations and Europe to botched Middle East peace negotiations. Mr. Sarkozy said the time had come to achieve peace.

“This new age should be an age of peace in the Middle East and I would invite Abu Mazen and Olmert to pursue peace negotiations to achieve total peace and establish an independent Palestinian state and open a new era of peace in the Middle East,” Mr. Mubarak said, using Mr. Abbas’s popular name.

The joint heads of the summit, Messrs. Sarkozy and Mubarak, both stressed that Middle East peace is crucial to forging closer political, economic and security ties between the 27 E.U. member nations, and poorer southern Mediterranean rim countries.

Mr. Olmert, 62, has also been conducting indirect talks with President Assad of Syria, through Turkish mediators, and encountered the Syrian leader for the first time yesterday in Paris.

Mr. Assad said Syria was ready to put an embassy in Israel and forge “links and treaties” with the Jewish state once a peace accord was reached. “Whether it’s called normal relations or anormalization makes little difference. These are normal relations,” Mr. Assad said on the Arab satellite channel Al- Jazeera, according to Agence France-Presse.

The Israeli leader told Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey yesterday, that “he is extremely serious in his desire to move forward in peace talks on the Syrian track,” an Olmert spokesman, Mark Regev, said.

Mr. Assad, asked in a France 2 national television interview if he shook Mr. Olmert’s hand, said: “No, we’re not yet at that symbol.”

“Any country that wishes to solve the issue of the Middle East must talk with Syria,” Mr. Assad said in the interview.

The last round of Israeli-Syrian negotiations stalled in 2000 over the future of the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau that Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War. Syria is demanding the return of all the territory in exchange for peace.

After speaking to the press with Mr. Sarkozy, Messrs. Olmert and Abbas met and repeated their commitment to reaching an agreement this year, Mr. Regev said.

He added that the Israeli leader, at Mr. Abbas’s request, agreed to free more Palestinian Arabs held by Israel. That release, he said, would go beyond those to be freed in an exchange that Israel has set up with the south Lebanese Shiite Muslim Hezbollah militia and a possible agreement with Hamas, Mr. Regev said.

“We are at a great moment of opportunity,” Prime Minister Brown told reporters. “We have two leaders engaged in detailed talks. I believe there is a great deal of common ground.”

The prisoner swap with Hezbollah, expected to come this week, is for two soldiers abducted in a cross-border attack that led to the monthlong 2006 Lebanon War. The talks with Hamas are for the release of Gilad Shalit, a soldier who has been held for the past two years.

Mr. Sarkozy said it was crucial to talk to all sides in the bid for Middle East peace and vowed he would return to both Israel and the Palestinian Territories to push forward negotiations.

The Middle East conflict also played a major role in the economic and regional talks the summit intended to focus on. Mr. Brown said rising food and fuel prices were among the challenges the nations had to face together by, among other things, encouraging oil producers to invest in alternative energy.

The meeting backed projects in environment, transport, education and civil protection to cope with and prevent natural disasters.

The one-day summit was attended mainly by heads of state and government of the 44 countries participating. Morocco was represented by Prince Moulay Rachid and the Czech Republic by Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra.