The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday in a telephone call to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that he is looking for consultation with the latter on Mideast peace process, the official MENA news agency reported.

Netanyahu said that his government will "press ahead with peacemaking despite pre-impressions," according to the report, adding that he is "looking for consultation with president Mubarak for Egypt to pursue painstaking efforts to bring about peace and stability to the Mideast."

For his part, Mubarak told Netanyahu that peace with the Palestinians is the sole way to bring stability to the region, it added without elaborating.

The belated call came as the two neighbors spatted over Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's harsh remarks about Egypt and outright snub of peace talks with the Palestinians since March 31,when the right-leaning Israeli cabinet was established.

In October 2008, Lieberman slammed Mubarak in Israel's Knesset(parliament), saying that the president should "go to hell" for his unwillingness to pay an official visit to Israel.

In 2001, he said that if Mubarak continued to consult with the then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and deployed forces in the Sinai Peninsular, Israel would "bomb the Aswan Dam."

Netanyahu tried to appease Egypt, the premier mediator between the Jewish country and the Palestinians, about his choice of Lieberman in his cabinet-making trail, but failed to leash the firebrand top diplomat, who said last Wednesday that making concessions will bring not peace but more wars.

During his first term as prime minister in the late 1990s, Netanyahu put a brake on the Oslo peace process even at the risk of falling out with the then US administration under President Bill Clinton.

(Xinhua News Agency April 7, 2009)