RAMALLAH: President Mahmoud Abbas has warned the Palestinians will take action against Israel through international bodies if peace talks fail, ahead of a visit by US Secretary of State John Kerry.
“The talks are going through great difficulties because of the obstacles created by Israel,” Abbas told visiting Arab journalists at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
“If we don’t obtain our rights through negotiations, we have the right to go to international institutions,” he said. “The commitment to refrain from action at the UN ends after the nine-month period agreed for talks.”
US-brokered peace talks, which resumed at the end of July after a three-year gap, have already hit a deadlock over Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank on land the Palestinians want for their future state.
The Palestinians agreed to suspend action against Israel through international bodies for the duration of the talks, including at the United Nations, where they won non-member observer status in a landmark General Assembly vote in November last year.
Kerry is to return to the region today for talks with Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his eighth overnight visit to the region since he took office in February. It will be the US top diplomat’s first visit since Israel backed down on plans to build some 20,000 new settler homes in the West Bank.
But Netanyahu’s government has already slated thousands of new settler homes for construction since the talks resumed in July. Last month, Kerry warned the settlements issue could break the negotiations at the risk of sparking a third Palestinian uprising.
The Palestinian negotiating team has already tendered its resignation over the issue but Abbas has yet to accept it.
Netanyahu had lambasted the nuclear accord, under which Iran agreed to roll back parts of its nuclear programme in return for limited sanctions relief, as a “historic mistake”.
His condemnation has not been toned down by repeated US assurances, including from President Barack Obama, that Iran would never be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb.
Netanyahu himself has now come under criticism at home for challenging Israel’s closest ally.
A former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, accused his outspoken rightwing successor of having “declared war against Barack Obama’s administration”.
And Finance Minister Yair Lapid, a member of the centre-right Yesh Atid party in the governing coalition, has also questioned Netanyahu’s tactics.
AFP
