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Syria accuses Israel of hindering peace process

12 October 2010 04:28 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad accused Israel Monday of working against peace between their countries, despite Western efforts to help negotiations resume, APA reports quoting â€œReutersâ€.
"There are ideas being put forward by some countries. They are preliminary and we do not know if they will push the process forward for not ... the atmosphere is not positive," Assad told reporters after meeting Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan in the Syrian capital.
"The Arab side really wants the peace process and the Israeli side is working in the opposite direction," he added.
Assad was referring to U.S. and French moves to relaunch Syrian-Israeli talks which broke off in 2008 without a deal.
Damascus has stuck to its demand for a total Israeli pullout from the Golan, a strategic plateau that Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East War.
Indirect talks were being mediated by Turkey, whose ties with Israel worsened this year after a deadly Israeli attack on an aid ship carrying Turkish activists, who were heading for the Gaza Strip in defiance of an Israeli blockade.
Assad last month separately met U.S. envoy George Mitchell, who is trying to rescue Israeli-Palestinian talks, and Jean-Claude Cousseran, who was appointed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to pursue the so-called Syrian-Israeli track.
Israel, which wants Syria to distance itself from Iran and Lebanon’s Shi’ite movement Hezbollah, insists on talking to Syria without preconditions.
Almost 10 years of face-to-face talks between the two countries that were being supervised by the United States collapsed in 2000 after Assad’s father, the late President Hafez al-Assad, turned down an Israeli offer that fell short of returning the whole of the Golan.