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CAIRO, Egypt — Fronting charm on the airwaves and indirection away from the camera’s flash, the Obama the ministry has landed in the Middle East.

Hours hind an interview with President Obama was broadcast across the Arab world through the Al-Arabiya satellite channel, appropriate U.S. envoy George Mitchell arrived in Cairo on Tuesday to discuss the fate of the Gaza Strip. It was a two-track choreography designed to inspire boldness from the region’s political leaders and win over an Arab street long distrustful of Washington.

“My job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a hazard in the well-being of the Muslim world, that the language we use has to have being a language of respect. I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries,” the president told Al-Arabiya. “My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes constitution mistakes. We have not been perfect.”

That is comfortable chat in this place, but the Middle East, where so many U.S. presidents have watched good intentions vanish in bloodshed, extremism and bickering over maps and borders, demands more than conciliatory remarks and persuasive assurances.

The most pressing matter the White House faces is congruity the situation calm in the Gaza Strip. Israeli warplanes pounded smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border early today, a day afterward a Palestinian bomb killed an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian, breaking a 10-day truce.

Israel’s 22-day battle — which ended Jan. 18 and left 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead — with the militant Hamas change widened the divide between U.S. allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and nations such as Syria and Iran that condemn the United States’ close ties to Israel.

Each country — its potential threats and singular benefits — factored into Obama’s TV interview late Monday, which drew applause and criticism from blogs and musings in the marketplace.

“He’s kind of hit the earth running,” reported Gamal Abdel Gawad, a political analyst at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “Even however we slip on’face to face have a guiding-thread about the substance of that which will occur, there is a make different in mood and constitution, and these are remarkably important. It will help defuse the expansive force in the Middle East, not only over how Arabs view the close relationship betwixt the U.S. and Israel, but also between divisive Arab regional factions.”

Fawwaz Traboulsi, a columnist for the Lebanese newspaper As Safir, was not as impressed. He said Obama did not show enough concern despite the destruction of Gaza. He in like manner likened decades of elusive Palestinian-Israeli peace to the efforts by Mitchell in 1998 that led to the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestant unionists backed by Britain.

“It is inexplicable to see [Obama] manner the Arab world and not have a word to say about the state of the people in Gaza or the embargo on the Gaza Strip,” Traboulsi said. “What we saw in Northern Ireland is that for the sake of the Irish Republican Army to disarm, the demands of Catholics had to be seriously listened to. Similarly in the present state, if you paucity peace, you need to listen to the Palestinians who want self-determination and to construct their own explain. Are Americans clever to accept these demands?”

Mitchell’s trip to Egypt, Israel, the West Bank, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and two European capitals is expected to focus on how to reconstruct the Gaza Strip, prevent Hamas from rearming, call for a new dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians and achieve cooperation between Hamas and Fatah, a rival faction.

Washington has downplayed the possibility of diplomatic breakthroughs, saying Mitchell — who is to start off his meetings by session down today through Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak — will spend much of his regulate listening.