With Israel-Palestinians

The United States has reached an informal agreement with Saudi Arabia to jointly step up pressure for a negotiated peace accord in the Middle East, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday.

The accord, honed during Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's talks with President George W. Bush last week in Texas, accelerates the emergence of the once furtive oil monarchy into an assertive and highly public Arab diplomatic force.

The United States, by contrast, which traditionally sought to keep even allies like France and other would-be European mediators at a distance, is welcoming the Saudis' intervention.

However, Egypt and Jordan, two moderate Arab countries that already have come to terms with Israel, are not being shunted aside. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak long has considered himself the primary Arab bridge to peacemaking with Israel, and the administration has continued to court him, King Abdullah II of Jordan and King Mohammed VI of Morocco.

Saudi Arabia already has gained Arab League approval of a "vision" of peace in which Israel would be pressured to give up all the land the Arabs lost in the 1967 Mideast war in exchange for promises of peace and security.

At Bush's Texas ranch, Abdullah added some details, eliciting a lukewarm reaction from the administration since it mixed proposals of which the United States approves and some that it does not back, such as sending an international peacekeeping force to the region.

In the makeshift division of labor, the Bush administration will concentrate its attention on Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel is due to see Bush at the White House next week and also on the Palestinians, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Saudis, meanwhile, will step up their efforts to enlist Arab countries in peacemaking.

Meanwhile, a handful of American monitors will supervise the imprisonment of six Palestinian terror suspects now confined to Yasser Arafat's West Bank headquarters, two U.S. officials said Tuesday.

They will be civilians, and may be recruited from private security firms, the officials told The Associated Press. They will not be the vanguard of an international peacekeeping operation, as long demanded by Arab leaders, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"And they will not hold the key to the prisoners' quarters," said one of the officials.

The purpose is to reassure Israel that the suspects, five of whom are wanted in the murder last October of an Israeli Cabinet minister, Rehavam Zeevi, will not be released through a "revolving door" justice system that the Palestinian Authority long has been accused of operating.

The sixth suspect is the alleged mastermind of an abortive attempt to smuggle 50 tons of Iranian weapons to the Palestinians.

Details of the monitoring arrangement are being worked out by a British assessment team with the help of a low-level State Department official.

Hassan Abdel Rahman, the Palestine Liberation Organization's chif representative in the United States, said Tuesday the wanted men would be transferred to Jericho.

But U.S. and Israeli officials said that and other details had not been worked out.