Middle East News

Israel silent on freeze as pressure mounts for extension (Roundup)

Sep 26, 2010, 15:17 GMT

Israeli right wingers and foreign supporters celebrate the end of the Israeli settlement construction freeze in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Revava on 26 September 2010. Israel\'s construction policy for their West Bank settlements is one of the main topics of the ongoing peace talks with the Palestinians. EPA/OLIVER WEIKEN

Jerusalem - Israeli officials were tightlipped Sunday amid heavy international pressure to extend a 10-month freeze on construction in Israeli West Bank settlements, which was due to expire at midnight (22OO GMT).

Palestinians have threatened to walk out of recently-launched peace talks if the freeze, instituted last November, is not continued.

Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath said only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could 'neutralize the explosive situation' by extending the moratorium.

Shaath, accompanying President Abbas on a visit to Paris, told Israel Radio that Israel would be responsible if the peace talks failed because the freeze was not extended.

As pressure mounted on Israel to make a last-minute decision to extend the moratorium, a spokesman for Netanyahu refused to comment on the issue, and the premier himself instructed ministers and deputy ministers not to talk to the media on the matter.

Netanyahu met Saturday night with his top aides to discuss the freeze, and Defence Minister Ehud Barak was due to return to Israel Sunday afternoon after meeting in Washington with US officials in an attempt to find a compromise which would resolve the impasse.

Barak told the British Broadcasting Corporation that there was a '50-50' chance on reaching an understanding on the issue.

Although the Israeli cabinet did not meet Sunday, because of the Jewish festival of Tabernacles, Barak was quoted in the Israeli media as urging ministers to support prolonging the freeze.

Abbas, for his part, said the construction freeze should continue so long as the sides were engaged in peace talks.

'We (asked for) a complete halt to settlements for a certain period as long as we are negotiating. If after a 3-month period of talks we reached nothing, then we should continue talks and the freeze continues. This is our suggestion,' Abbas was quoted as saying by the al-Hayat newspaper.

Hamas, meanwhile, called on the Palestinian president to leave the peace talks and instead focus on attempts to end the rift between Abbas' West Bank-based Palestinian Authority and the Islamist movement ruling the Gaza Strip.

'The best Palestinian response to Netanyahu's stubbornness is that Abbas withdraw from the negotiations and announce their end,' Hamas' Gaza spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in a statement.

'Instead, Abbas should hurry up in finalizing the inter- Palestinian reconciliation, and end the current rift and reunite the Palestinian people,' the statement said.

Hamas and Abbas' Fatah party, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, have been a loggerheads since June 2007, when, in a week of bloody violence, Hamas gunmen in the Gaza Strip routed security officers loyal to Abbas and seized full control of the salient.

Abbas responded by pulling Fatah out of a short-lived national unity government with Hamas, and refusing to recognise Hamas leader Ismail Haniya as Palestinian prime minister. Attempts to end the rift have so far come to naught.

In another development, the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) announced Sunday it was suspending its membership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) executive committee, to protest the continuation of peace talks.

'We decided not to attend the PLO executive committee's meetings in response to the dangerous consequences of the concession policy and the return to the talks on the Israeli and American terms,' PFLP leader Khaleda Jarar told a news conference in Ramallah

The second largest faction in the PLO, after Abbas' Fatah party, the PFLP has rejected the Oslo Israeli-Palestinian interim peace accords, and Jarar said the recent decision to resume the direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks was 'a dangerous retreat from the decisions of the PLO central council and would hurt the PLO national interests.