Protesters Greet First Lady

Laura Bush Visits Holy Sites In Jerusalem

(AP)  "As you can tell from our day here, this is a place of emotions everywhere we went, from the Dome of the Rock to the Western Wall" she told reporters at the palace ruins.

As for the peace process, Mrs. Bush said the U.S. would do whatever it could, but that both sides share responsibility in helping achieve peace.

"It will take a lot of baby steps and I'm sure that there will be a few steps backward on the way, but I want to encourage the people I met with earlier, the women I just met with, that the United States will do what they can in this process," Mrs. Bush said.

"It also requires the work of the people here, of the Palestinians and the Israelis, to come to the table obviously, and we'll see," she said.

The first lady met in Jericho with leading Palestinian women before visiting the palace. Earlier, she held talks with Gila Katsav, the wife of Israel's president, and other leading Israeli women.

Anti-American sentiment is running high in the Mideast because of a variety of factors, including a now-retracted report in Newsweek that Pentagon investigators had found evidence interrogators at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, placed copies of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, in washrooms to unsettle suspects and flushed a Quran down a toilet.

"We in principle don't reject anyone's visit to the Al Aqsa Mosque (compound), but we see in the visit of Mrs. Bush an attempt to whitewash the face of the United States, after the crimes that the American interrogators had committed when they desecrated the Quran," the militant Islamic Hamas group said in a statement on its Web site.

Adnan Husseini, director of the Islamic Trust that administers the mosque compound, said Mrs. Bush tried to play down the heckling, saying it could have happened anywhere.

Husseini said he told her he hoped President Bush would exert pressure to achieve peace in the Holy Land. Mr. Bush is meeting on Thursday at the White House with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Later Sunday, Mrs. Bush laid a wreath at Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial for the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust of World War II.

She wrote in the visitors' book at the site: "Each life is precious. Each memory calls us to action to honor those lost. We commit ourselves to reject hatred and to teach tolerance and live in peace. Thank you."