Asia

Home page

Asia

Netanyahu sees new talks with Palestinians

27 April 2010 22:29 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas "intends" to renew stalled peace negotiations, suggesting a breakthrough was possible after months of deadlock, APA reports quoting The Washington Post.

In a speech to his right-wing Likud faction in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu said talks with the Palestinians, which the United States has sought to convene, may resume as soon as next week.

Netanyahu also said he would visit Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace deal with Israel, for talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Monday.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, has been pushing the two sides to resume negotiations that have been stalled since the three-week Gaza war that began in Dec 2008, on an indirect basis or so-called "proximity" talks.

Mitchell held three days of talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders during a visit last week.
ad_icon

Netanyahu said he had "heard with satisfaction" that Abbas "intends to renew the talks. I will be very glad if this will indeed by carried out next week."

He did not say where he had heard Abbas say he was ready for new talks, nor was it clear exactly what venue was envisaged, or whether any progress toward a deal was in sight given the wide gaps that remain on core issues such as Israeli settlement policy in Jerusalem.

’FINAL ANSWER’?

Nabil Abu-Rdainah, a senior aide to Abbas, told Reuters the Palestinian leader had asked an Arab League panel "to agree upon a final answer" to Mitchell’s proposals for indirect talks mediated by Washington. He had no further comment.

Mitchell is expected to visit the region again in the coming days.

Abbas had long insisted Israel freeze Jewish settlement building before the talks resume, and had rejected a temporary hiatus in construction ordered by Netanyahu last year as insufficient.

But Palestinian sources said Sunday that Mitchell had offered them, in exchange for holding indirect contacts with Israel, an unwritten commitment to assign blame publicly to any party that takes actions which compromise the negotiations.

The formula appeared to envisage a situation in which Israel could quietly delay implementing housing projects in and around East Jerusalem -- construction which Washington has said could jeopardize peacemaking -- without declaring a freeze.

Jerusalem is a key issue in the conflict. Israel sees the city as its indivisible capital. It captured Arab East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it in a move that is not recognized internationally. Palestinians want the city to be capital of a future state and fear that Israeli settlement will hinder the creation of a viable entity.

Netanyahu was speaking ahead of a party vote Thursday, in which he hopes to delay a leadership battle with a far-right faction whose opposition to compromise on Jerusalem highlights the political pressure he faces from pro-settler hardliners.

Netanyahu insisted Israel would continue to demand that Palestinians recognize the right of a Jewish state to exist, but criticized his rightist adversaries as an "extremist minority," and said: "We aren’t against peace, we are in favor of peace."