The Palestinians said the summit with Egypt, Israel and Jordan would be held in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh on Monday although there was no immediate confirmation of the date or venue from the other participants.

"This four-way summit will take place on Monday in Egypt at the invitation of President (Hosni) Mubarak," Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP.

Aides said the Palestinian president would head to Egypt on Sunday for talks with Mubarak ahead of the summit.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokeswoman said he had been in touch by telephone with both Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan since returning home on Wednesday from talks with US President George W Bush.

"There is a real possibility that such a summit could take place next week in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, but for the moment nothing has been definitively decided," Miri Eisin said.

There was also no confirmation from the hosts.

Eisin said Olmert intended to secure approval ahead of the planned summit to release at least 600 million dollars in tax revenues owed to the Palestinian Authority to the new emergency cabinet sworn in by Abbas in the West Bank.

The prime minister would "ask the cabinet on Sunday to end the freeze on the transfer of funds owed by Israel to the Palestinian Authority," she said.

Housing Minister Meir Sheetrit said he was worried that little concrete would come out of the four-way talks in Egypt, but added that he was heartened by Abbas's new tough approach to Hamas after 15 months of uneasy power-sharing.

"I am not very optimistic because the results of previous summits organised in Sharm el-Sheikh have been disappointing," the Israeli minister told army radio.

"This time Abu Mazen (Abbas) seems to have finally decided to get tough against Hamas while the Arab leaders cannot allow the creation of a 'Hamastan' that will threaten all countries in the region."

The summit talk came after the Palestinian president delivered a withering attack against the Islamist movement Hamas for its armed seizure of the Gaza Strip last week and ruled out any dialogue with the "traitors".

Abbas accused Hamas -- considered a terrorist organisation by Israel -- of carrying out killings "unprecedented" in Palestinian history in the week of ferocious fighting in Gaza that killed more than 110 people.

The president said the Islamists had given Israel an "excuse to punish an entire people" and even accused Hamas for the first time of having plotted to kill him.

"No dialogue with putschists, murderers and terrorists," he thundered in an address to a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization, of which he is chairman but of which Hamas is not a member.

The speech was dismissed as a "pack of lies" by a Hamas spokesman and sparked angry demonstrations across the Gaza Strip where pictures and effigies of the Palestinian president were burned.

Abbas strongly defended his decision to dismiss the Hamas-led national unity government last week and swear in the emergency cabinet that Hamas has dismissed as an illegitimate lackey of Israel and the United States.

"Our main objective is to prevent the chaos from spreading to the West Bank," he said, adding that the new government of technocrats led by US-educated prime minister Salam Fayyad was the "clear answer to the coup."

Israeli Foreign Tzipi Livni telephoned Fayyad on Wednesday to open dialogue with his government after the 15-month hiatus while Hamas were in power.

Abbas called for an international conference to be convened to oversee the relaunch of talks with Israel, like the Madrid conference of 1991 that helped pave the way for the secret talks that led to the 1993 Oslo autonomy accords.

"We call for negotiations to resume ... and in the framework an international conference the details of which we will agree" with the Israelis, the president said.

It was unclear whether Abbas planned to raise the idea at next week's planned regional summit.

The exodus to Israel of the last foreigners in Gaza continued on Thursday with the evacuation of around 30 American Palestinians, largely women and children.

"There's no freedom here. There's no security for our lives," said one woman who called herself the head of an American-Palestinian friendship association.