Friday 10 December 2010

“PA to Cancel all Security Commitments to Israel” & Clinton Intensifies Meetings in Bid to End Palestinian, Israeli Impasse

“PA to Cancel all Security Commitments to Israel”

10/12/2010 “The Palestinian Authority will stop coordinating its security with Israel, in response to the US's official announcement that peace talks have failed,” Al Quds al-Arabi reported on Friday.

Khana Amira, a PLO official, told the UK newspaper that the PA is also considering canceling its other commitments to Israel, including the Oslo Accords and the Road Map, which demand that resistance organizations will stop.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior PLO official and an adviser to PA President Mahmoud Abbas reportedly plans to convene a meeting with the PLO and Fatah central committees on Friday afternoon, in order to make a new plan for the Palestinians.

Palestinian officials told Al Quds al-Arabi that they expect US President Barack Obama to attempt to restart “peace talks” between Israel and the Palestinians. "Maybe the meeting will give the American government another chance," an official told the paper.

The Palestinians are also considering seeking the UN Security Council's recognition of a Palestinian state on all the Palestinian territories that were occupied by Israel in 1967.

Clinton Intensifies Meetings in Bid to End Palestinian, Israeli Impasse


10/12/2010 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is holding a flurry of talks to find a new way to break the deadlock in Middle East “peace talks” following a failed US push for an Israeli settlement freeze.

The chief US diplomat was scheduled to meet in Washington on Friday with chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, US officials said. These talks follow those she had with Israel's chief peace negotiator Yitzhak Molcho from whom she sought "a perspective on the Israeli side of how to move forward," her spokesman Philip Crowley said, without elaborating.

Crowley said Clinton had spoken twice over the telephone on Wednesday with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas to encourage him to send Erakat to Washington. The burst of talks will be capped by an evening speech Clinton will give to the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, outlining new ideas to rescue the Obama administration's struggling diplomatic efforts in the region.

Talks were thrown into disarray on Tuesday when the United States conceded it had failed in its weeks-long efforts to persuade Israel to renew a freeze on settlement building in the occupied West Bank.

Israel's former defense minister Shaul Mofaz, a member of the centrist Kadima party who will attend Clinton's speech, told reporters in Washington on Thursday that the United States and Israel got off to a wrong start. "I believe that the freeze was a strategic mistake for both sides," Mofaz said, referring the 10-month Israeli moratorium on settlements that expired in September. "It was the first time that preconditions were forced into the process. After 10 months of freeze in Jerusalem and the settlements, nothing happened and the issue of the moratorium became the main issue," he said.

UN, EU: Israel Obliged to Freeze Settlement Construction
Meanwhile Abbas's militia kidnaps 28 Hamas supporters
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

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