WASHINGTON — All eyes will be on the Syrian delegation today and tomorrow in the highly anticipated Middle East peace conference at Annapolis after the Bashar al-Assad regime decided at the last minute to take up the invitation from Secretary of State Rice and send its deputy foreign minister.

Faisal Mekdad left for America yesterday in hopes of securing the Golan Heights, territory Israel won in the 1967 Six-Day War. Israeli officials, in anticipation of the conference, have welcomed Syrian participation and even raised the prospect of reviving the long dormant talks on possibly returning the territory.

In an interview yesterday with Al-Jazeera, Syria’s foreign minister, Walid Moallem, said that Israel should allow the roughly 400,000 Palestinian Arab refugees in Syria to return to Gaza or the West Bank. The statement was a slight pivot from Syria’s traditional view that the Palestinian Arabs, who include descendants of those who fled Israel’s creation, had a right to return to the pre-1967 Israel. That demand is seen as a non-starter by the Israelis, who fear such a migration would end the demographic majority for Jews in the Jewish state.

“Israel sees in a positive way the high-ranking participation of Syria at the Annapolis meeting,” a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Olmert, Miri Eisin, said yesterday on CNN. Behind the scenes, American officials have said that the Syrian-Israeli track will be broached tomorrow in Annapolis, though the focus of the talks will be launching a final status process to divide Jerusalem, settling Palestinian Arab grievances about refugees from the 1948 war that created the Jewish state, and formalizing Israel’s retreat from the West Bank, territory it also won in the 1967 war.

Tomorrow, conferees will conduct three working sessions focusing on resolving bilateral issues between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs; building Palestinian institutions, and addressing outstanding regional issues.

Syria’s participation is potentially a victory for Ms. Rice’s strategy to create a wider coalition against the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2006, the Syrians formalized a military and intelligence alliance with Iran. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, yesterday called the upcoming Annapolis summit “useless.”

“The peace conference has no benefit for the oppressed Palestinian nation. It is only for supporting the Zionist occupiers,” he said, according to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency. In a thinly veiled barb at Iran’s Syrian allies, he said, “Participation in this summit is an indication of the lack of intelligence of some so-called politicians.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s proxy in Gaza, Hamas had even harsher words for the summit. “This meeting will only come out with more failures and more harm to the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian and Arab rights,” a spokesman for Hamas, Sami Abu Zuhri, said in a statement Saturday.

Hamas gunmen seized the Palestinian Preventive Security Services in Gaza in a coup in June, besting those fighters trained by America and Egypt in Fatah. As a result, the Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas excised Hamas from the Palestinian Authority in the same month, removing the main obstacle for Israel to negotiate again with the Palestinian Arabs on the final borders of an independent state.

Iran and Hamas were two entities not invited to the Annapolis, making them the exception and not the rule for the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Last week, the State Department sent out invitations to 40 countries, as well as the Arab League, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.

The participation of Arab states such as Saudi Arabia is being touted by the State Department as a major accomplishment. While the Saudis were observers at the 1991 peace summit in Madrid, Spain, tomorrow’s conference will mark the first American-brokered peace-making efforts in which Riyadh will be a full participant.

Nonetheless, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, who arrived in Washington yesterday, said he was reluctant to attend and assured Arab reporters that he would not shake hands with any Israeli. “We are not prepared to take part in a theatrical show, in handshakes and meetings that don’t express political positions. We are going with seriousness and we work on the same seriousness and credibility,” he said.

The State Department is hoping Saudi Arabia’s participation in the peace conference will signal that the kingdom is changing its position on the Palestinian Authority. To date the Saudis have encouraged Mr. Abbas to cut a power sharing deal with Hamas, a group that is effectively at war with Mr. Abbas’s Fatah Party and in the past has received financial support from members of the Saudi royal family.

Foggy Bottom also hopes that the participation of the Arab League will make good on its promise to send $50 million a month to the Palestinian Authority, a pledge that has not been met since Hamas’s takeover of Gaza.

Israel is looking for Egypt to deploy its military and security services on the border with Gaza to end the smuggling of arms and cash to Hamas. The Egyptians have sought to reopen their peace treaty with Israel on this score.

Privately, American and Israeli diplomats are skeptical that Annapolis will yield any breakthrough in peace making. As of last night, the Israeli and Palestinian Arab delegations had yet to finish even a statement of principles for future negotiations, a document the Bush administration is hoping to unveil tomorrow at the end of the conference.

“It’s one thing to have the Arabs attend a conference,” an Israeli official said yesterday. “But it’s more important to come to a conference with intention of backing efforts to make peace. For this, we will have to wait and see.”

President Bush yesterday in a statement said the participation of so many Arab countries did signal support for a peaceful settlement to the conflict. “This conference will signal international support for the Israelis’ and Palestinians’ intention to commence negotiations on the establishment of a Palestinian state and the realization of peace between these two peoples,” he said.

Mr. Bush will address the conferees today.