CAIRO, May 25 (AFP) - The Arab League added its voice Tuesday to the mounting pressure for a summit between Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to pave the way for a wider meeting of Israel's Arab neighbours. "I am hoping for a Syrian-Palestinian summit that could pave the way" for a wider summit also involving Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, the League's assistant secretary for Palestinian affairs, Said Kamal, told AFP. Relations between Assad and Arafat have long been strained -- the Syrian leader regarded the Oslo accords which the Palestinians signed with Israel in 1993 as a separate peace concluded without any regard for the interests of the other frontline states. In recent weeks Palestinian officials have issued repeated calls for a rapprochement as the launch of negotiations on a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians draws near, but they have all been rebuffed. "We have been sending signals to Syria -- especially as we will be going now to final-status talks with issues related to everyone. But we have not received a positive resonse," the Palestine Liberation Organization number two Mahmud Abbas said Sunday. "Any time President Arafat is invited we are ready. The ball is in their court," he said. Kamal lent support to longstanding Syrian demands that any meeting of Arab leaders be called upon to take meaningful decisions. "Such a summit should not be a mere protocol meeting, it should be a real working session that leads to concrete results," the League official said. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Sunday that consultations were underway for a five-way summit of Israel's Arab neighbours. But he gave a far more limited assessment of the purposes of a frontline summit. "Such a summit would not necessarily impose conditions or issue ultimatums but would simply confirm the Arab position and the peace strategy adopted by Arab leaders at their (June 1996) Cairo summit," Mubarak said. The Cairo summit held following the election of right-wing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was ousted in last week's polls, linked normalization of relations with Israel to progress in the peace process, but its decisions were never implemented. Damascus provides a base for the 10 Palestinian opposition groups opposed to the Oslo accords. Arafat and Assad last met in Tehran in December 1997 on the sidelines of an Islamic summit. Arafat last visited Damascus in 1996.  