JERUSALEM (Reuters) – American, Israeli and Palestinian officials were engaged in “intensive” efforts yesterday to find a compromise on a settlement moratorium whose impending expiration could doom nascent peace talks, officials said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered an envoy visiting the US to extend his stay “specificially to deal with this issue,“ an Israeli official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Israeli media reports said Defence Minister Ehud Barak was also in the United States to help efforts to prevent the peace negotiations from collapsing just a month after they started.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly said he will quit the talks if the Israelis refuse to extend a 10-month freeze on settlement building in the occupied West Bank that expires at midnight on Sunday. Israel has rejected the demand.
Speaking at the United Nations in New York yesterday, Abbas did not specifically refer to the imminent expiry of the freeze, but made clear that Israel would have to cease its settlement building if the negotiations were to succeed.
Piling pressure on Netanyahu, President Barack Obama called publicly on him to extend the partial building moratorium in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday.
Netanyahu’s pro-settler dominated governing coalition objects to extending the freeze and the prime minister has ruled out any extension, arguing that no other Israeli leader has been forced to halt building work during previous peace talks.
But he will not want to be blamed by Washington if the talks fail so soon after their launch and must also satisfy Israeli public support for further peace negotiations.
The Israeli official said an effort to find a compromise was under way that had been “very intensive over the last few days” and involved Netanyahu, US Vice President Joe Biden, and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who serves as an envoy of Middle East power brokers known as the Quartet.
An American official also confirmed there was an “intense” negotiating effort to prevent the negotiations, renewed after a 20-month deadlock, from collapsing over settlements that are deemed illegal under international law.
Officials have refused to comment on what compromise was being considered. Among the ideas being floated by Israeli officials was a partial resumption of building confined to the settlement blocs Israel seeks to keep under any peace deal.
To Palestinians, the settlements amount to an occupation of land they want for a state, and they have not said whether they could accept that formula.
