WASHINGTON, 8 March — With the violence escalating in the Middle East, pollsters have been keeping their fingers on the pulse of American opinion. Significantly, they have found that since October, US support for Israel has dropped by 10 percent.

New data from a weekend Gallup poll indicate that four out of 10 Americans say the United States supports Israel “too much” — up from late last year.

Thirty-eight percent of Americans now say the United States supports Israel too much, while 48 percent say the amount of US support for Israel is about right and just 11 percent say the support level is too little. Last October, 29 percent said US support was too much, similar to the 31 percent found in December.

Democrats are slightly more likely than Republicans to say the United States supports Israel too much.

Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, leaves for a 10-day trip to the Middle East this weekend with approval ratings generally in the 60 percent range, but with an American public skeptical that peace will ever come to the region.

The American public is not optimistic that peace is imminent in the Middle East. Fifty-nine percent say there will never be a time when peace comes to the region.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s visit with President Bush is timely, coming at a time when Americans actually view his country more favorably than many other countries in the region.

A Gallup Poll update on perceptions of foreign nations last month found Egypt with a 54 percent favorable rating, higher than Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority, Afghanistan or Libya.

Significantly, Israel is only slightly above Egypt on the list, with a 58 percent favorable rating among Americans.

Populations in the United States and the Muslim countries hold mostly negative views of each others’ countries.

A further update of the two recent polls conducted by The Gallup Organization, one conducted in each of nine Muslim countries, and the other conducted in the United States, reveal high levels of negative feelings between Muslims and Americans.

With a few exceptions, Americans tend to hold more unfavorable than favorable opinions of the nine Muslim countries that were polled by Gallup, while people in those countries are likely to have similarly negative views of the United States.

There are some notable exceptions, with Americans holding net favorable views of three countries — Turkey, Morocco, and Jordan — while two countries (Turkey and Lebanon) express net favorable views of the United States.

But in four of the Muslim countries, more than six in 10 of its citizens say they have unfavorable opinions of the United States, and in two other Muslim countries, net negative opinion is quite substantial even though not expressed by a majority.

Americans tend not to be as negative toward the Muslim countries as the citizens of those countries are toward the United States, but American opinion is heavily negative toward four of the countries and moderately negative toward two others.

Overall, the US poll shows that 24 percent of Americans say they have a favorable opinion of Muslim countries in general, while 41 percent have an unfavorable view. Another 35 percent express no opinion one way or the other.