PA President Abbas with PM Netanyahu 311 (R).
(photo credit:Jonathan Ernst / Reuters)
Efforts are under way to arrange a meeting between Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, PLO Secretary-
General Yasser Abed Rabbo declared Thursday.
Abed Rabbo said that Israel
was not taking any political or practical measures to pave the way for a meeting
between Abbas and Netanyahu.
He added that Israel would first have to
meet some of the Palestinians’ condition before a summit between the two men
could take place, although he did not specify which conditions Israel would have
to meet for such an outcome to occur.
“Contacts are continuing to ease
tensions between the two sides and prepare for the resumption of the peace
process,” Abed Rabbo told the PA’s Voice of Palestine radio station.
The
US, he added, remained opposed to Abbas’s bid to unilaterally seek UN
recognition of a Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, US Middle East envoy David
Hale is expected to return to the region in the coming days for talks aimed at
reviving the peace process.
The US has told the Palestinian leadership
that they have “new, positive ideas” on how to revive the peace process, Ameen
Makbul, a Fatah official in the West Bank, said on Thursday.
Makbul said
that Hale would brief the PA leadership on US plans to break the current
stalemate in the peace process, but did not say whether Hale would try to
arrange a meeting between Abbas and Netanyahu.
After Hale’s visit, the PA
leadership will make a final decision whether to go ahead with the statehood bid
at the UN or return to the negotiating table, the Fatah official
said.
The London-based
Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper quoted a senior
Palestinian official as saying that renewed US efforts to revive the peace talks
are designed to stop the PA from pursuing its plan to seek unilateral UN
recognition of a Palestinian state.
The official said that fresh US ideas
include more goodwill gestures on the part of Israel, such as the release of
Palestinian prisoners and freezing settlement construction.
Earlier this
week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton phoned Abbas and discussed with him
ways of resuming the peace talks with Israel, the official pointed out.