JERUSALEM/PARIS (Reuters) – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas yesterday put off a threatened decision to quit peace talks with Israel, leaving more time for diplomacy to save negotiations from collapse over Israel’s settlement building.
The United States, France, Britain and the United Nations said they were disappointed that Israel had refused to extend the freeze on settlement construction ordered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 10 months ago to foster direct talks.
“We recognize that given the (Israeli) decision yesterday we’ve still got a dilemma that we have to resolve and there are no direct negotiations scheduled at this point,” US State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said.
US Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell headed for the region yesterday evening and hopes to hold talks with Israeli and Palestinian officials tomorrow and Thursday, Crowley said.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said after talks with Abbas in Paris that the Palestinian leader and Netanyahu had accepted his invitation to peace talks before the end of October which Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak also has been asked to attend.
Briefing reporters after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moualem in New York, Crowley also said Moualem was “very interested” in the possibility of reviving an Israeli-Syrian peace track.
Earth-moving equipment began work in at least three settlements in the occupied West Bank but there was little sign, during a Jewish holiday, of wide-scale resumption of construction following the 10-month moratorium’s midnight expiration. “It’s all symbolic for now,” Israeli Housing Minister Ariel Atias told the YNet news website, questioning whether Defense Minister Ehud Barak, whose ministry oversees Israeli activities in the West Bank, would agree to issue new building permits.
A window of at least one week was open for US diplomatic efforts to avert what would be a major embarrassment for President Barack Obama — the collapse of a peace process launched at the White House nearly four weeks ago.
Abbas, who had threatened to abandon the negotiations if settlement building was revived, said he would withhold his decision until after an Arab League forum met on Oct. 4 and consultations with a Palestine Liberation Organization council. “We will not have swift reactions now, to say ‘yes or no — we want, or we don’t want,’“ Abbas told a news conference with Sarkozy.
“Israel has a moratorium for 10 months and it should be extended for three to four months more to give peace a chance,” Abbas said. The French leader, for his part, said “the settlements must stop.”
Palestinians fear settlements, built on land Israel captured from Jordan in a 1967 war, will deny them the viable state they hope to create in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
The Gaza Strip is run by Hamas Islamists opposed to Abbas’s peace efforts.
