The newly started Israeli-Palestinian talks will fail unless Israel extends a partial ban on settlement building in the West Bank, territory the Palestinians want for a future state, Arab League chief Amr Moussa warned.
Moussa also reacted angrily on Friday to a vote earlier in the day in the UN nuclear agency in Vienna that defeated an Arab call for Israel to join the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).
Speaking on the sidelines of the UN annual summit in New York, Moussa said negotiations could not proceed if building of settlements continued on the occupied West Bank because it would threaten “the territorial integrity of the new state of Palestine.”
PHOTO: AFP
“Negotiations cannot go with settlements,” he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said a partial moratorium on settlement construction will not be extended when it expires tomorrow.
“If they continue eroding the territorial integrity of the Palestinian lands, if they continue changing the demographic composition of the territories, why are the negotiations conducted, why are we wasting time?” Moussa asked.
Earlier in the week, Moussa met with senior diplomats from the Quartet of Mideast peacemakers — the US, the EU, the UN and Russia — to discuss a way forward in the talks.
The Quartet also has called on Israel to extend its settlement freeze.
Israel has refused to do so.
Moussa indirectly criticized the US and other Western nations, claiming they were continuing to support Israel’s intransigence.
“Defending Israel on everything, even [against] calling on Israel to join the Nonproliferation Treaty, is something very, very strange and does not augur well to building confidence,” he said.
He said the Arab effort to get the 151-nation UN nuclear agency to urge Israel to join the international nuclear treaty to which all other states in the Middle East belong, failed after a “worldwide campaign” by Israel’s Western allies to prevent this.
The resolution was defeated earlier on Friday by a five-vote margin at the agency’s meeting. Israel is generally assumed to have assembled a sizable arsenal of nuclear warheads since the 1960s. Washington strongly opposed the Arab move.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a last-ditch effort to convince Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas not to walk out of fledgling peace talks over Israeli settlements.
Clinton failed to break the deadlock in Friday talks in New York, but both planned to resume the effort.
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