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President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday the Palestinians would only resume peace talks if Israel fully halted settlement building in the occupied West Bank, but ruled out any return to violence.
Addressing a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's central council, which is expected to extend his term as president, Abbas dismissed Israel's partial settlement freeze and said the Israelis did not want negotiations.
Sami and Tayseer Barakat grew up together in the concrete warrens of this refugee camp in Gaza, but the common thread ends there.
As young adults, Tayseer moved to the West Bank while Sami remained in Gaza. The choices have shaped the brothers' lives, values, prosperity and opportunities, and they have placed the two at very different points in what is now a three-way feud among Israelis and Palestinians.
Reports that Egypt is building a steel underground wall along its border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip have fueled speculation about what exactly Cairo intends to accomplish with the project, which British newspapers claim is being carried out with the help of the US Army Corps of Engineers.
In an unprecedented move, Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Sunday cut ties with one of the dozens of religious seminaries that feed students to the military amid concerns that its ideologically driven students might refuse orders to evacuate settlements.
The military was concerned that the chief rabbi of the school, known as a “hesder” yeshiva and located in the West Bank settlement of Har Bracha, was educating students to become insubordinate soldiers.
2009 saw no resumption of the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. Both sides are beginning the New Year at a stalemate over Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and rising tensions over the status of Jerusalem.
2009 began with bombs and rockets as Israel launched a massive assault, Operation Cast Lead, aimed at stopping militants from firing rockets at Israel.
During the assault, militants from Gaza continued to fire homemade missiles over the border, exploding in communities of southern Israel.
President Mahmoud Abbas told Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leaders that the Palestinian Authority (PA) will return to negotiations once Israel abides by its previous commitments, as well as reiterated that he will not seek reelection.
“The PA will restart peace negotiations once Israel halts all settlement construction and recognizes the 1967 borders as the official borders of the future Palestinian state,” Abbas said.
A majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip support President Mahmoud Abbas' decision not to run in the next elections, results of an independent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) showed Monday.
From its findings, PSR concluded, "While the balance of power between Fatah and Hamas remains as it was before the eruption of the Goldstone report crisis, the majority do not blame Hamas for the continued split between the West Bank and Gaza Strip or for the failure to hold national elections.
The Palestinian caretaker government intends to undertake the construction of its institutions rather than depending on renting buildings that were originally designed for residential purposes, said the Ramallah-based government's Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on Monday.
Whilst pointing out that several PA institutions owned the buildings they worked in, such as the Ministry of Finance, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestinian National Forces, the majority of headquarters of public sector institutions were rented, Fayyad said.
The White House condemns the torching of a mosque, yet respectable Americans contribute to a yeshiva whose rabbi said it's okay to kill gentile babies. It is no surprise that the American administration tacitly, if unenthusiastically, accepted the excuse that the map of national priority zones the cabinet approved on Sunday does not violate the decision to freeze construction in the settlements.
Hamas spokesman Ayman Taha said Tuesday that a prisoner exchange deal for the release of abducted Israel Defense Forces solider Gilad Shalit was still a long way off.
President Shimon Peres told IDF soldiers Monday that the release Shalit did not depend solely on Israel, but was being hampered by disagreements between Hamas' wing in the Gaza Strip and its overseas wing.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday told members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)'s Central Council that he would not be willing to resume peace talks with Israel until the latter stops settlement construction in the West Bank and recognizes the borders of a future Palestinian state, the Chinese News Agency reported.
"If settlement activity were to stop completely for a specific period and borders of a [Palestinian] state were declared within the 1967 borders, we would go to negotiations," Abbas said ahead of the meeting in Ramallah.
Israel has reacted angrily to the issuing by a British court of an arrest warrant for the former Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni.
The warrant, issued by a London court on Saturday, was revoked on Monday when it was found Ms Livni was not visiting the UK.
Ms Livni was in post during Israel's controversial Gaza assault last winter.
It is the first time a UK court has issued a warrant for an Israeli former minister.
Pro-Palestinian campaigners have tried several times to have Israeli officials arrested under the principle of universal jurisdiction.
Mahmoud is proud of the motorbike he bought two months ago for $700, now parked in the sand at the entrance of one of the tunnels used to smuggle the machines into Gaza.
It is all the more precious these days. After an influx of bikes through the deep underground passages between Gaza and Egypt resulted in carnage on the roads by young, untrained riders, the Hamas government ordered the imports to stop.
The new European Union document on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is being interpreted in Jerusalem as a warning to the Israelis: Do more to restart stalled peace talks or face mounting pressure from Europe.
The sympathy in the words of Israeli Minister Benny Begin and the attack of settlers against the mosque of the village of Yasuf in the West Bank, in addition to the tepid response to Palestinian efforts aimed at obtaining international recognition of the state which the Palestinian Authority is threatening to declare unilaterally, reveals the depth of the Palestinian predicament and its urgent need for a approach different from that which has proved bankrupt, in and from the side of the two camps dominating the Palestinian scene.
PEACE with Palestinians has never been on the agenda of Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu. Nevertheless, he speaks about peace. In his view peace has only one meaning — the total surrender of Palestinians to Israel. In his opinion, all the Palestinians presently living in the occupied territories are terrorists because they demand freedom from Israel; they want East Jerusalem to be the capital of their independent state; they don’t want their children to die of malnutrition; they don’t want to be humiliated by Israeli soldiers or thrown arbitrarily out of their homes and farms.
Binyamin Netanyahu's announcement in late November that his government would implement a settlement freeze was not taken seriously by Palestinians, Arabs or other interested and involved parties.
Palestinians warned that the announcement amounted to no more than a public relations gimmick aimed at reducing growing international criticism of Israel's settlement expansion policies. Palestinian officials made clear that the Israeli "freeze" did not signal any change to Israeli settlement expansion, which is responsible for preventing the resumption of negotiations.
The US administration was very quick to announce its appreciation of the Israeli right-wing government's decision to temporarily and partially halt settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territories. In doing so, Washington has only shown its weakness. If the US cannot convince Israel even to properly freeze settlement construction in occupied territory, then how will it convince Israel to dismantle settlements? And if that doesn't happen, what then for the two-state solution?
Links:
[1] http://www.americantaskforce.org/print/10270
[2] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printmail/10270
[3] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printpdf/10270
[4] http://www.americantaskforce.org/rss/wpr
[5] https://www.americantaskforce.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=1
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/12/15/world/news-us-palestinians-israel-abbas.html?ref=middleeast
[7] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/14/AR2009121403728.html
[8] http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2009/1214/Gaza-border-Why-Egypt-is-building-a-steel-underground-wall
[9] http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2009/1214/Israel-Who-will-soldiers-obey-on-settlements-Netanyahu-or-rabbis
[10] http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/middle-east/A-Year-of-Stalemate-Dashed-Hopes-in-Israeli-Palestinian-Conflict-79238012.html
[11] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=247080
[12] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=247032
[13] http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=246989
[14] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1135200.html
[15] http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1135208.html
[16] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1260877312319&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
[17] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8413234.stm
[18] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/14/palestine-israel-smuggling-in-gaza
[19] http://jta.org/news/article/2009/12/14/1009725/are-eu-israel-ties-on-the-rocks
[20] http://www.daralhayat.com/portalarticlendah/86797
[21] http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=129608&d=15&m=12&y=2009
[22] http://www.bitterlemons.org/issue/pal1.php
[23] http://www.bitterlemons.org/issue/pal2.php
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