Senator George Mitchell has been appointed the Middle East Peace Envoy by President Barak Obama.
The son of an Irish father and a Lebanese mother, Senator Mitchell, negotiated the 1998 Good Friday agreement that helped bring peace to Northern Ireland.
He already has experience in the Middle East: in 2000 he led an international fact-finding mission seeking ways to end the violence between Palestinians and Israelis. The results, which appear in the 2001 Mitchell Commission Report, call for a freeze of Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory and the withdrawal of the Israeli army from West Bank towns.