Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said on Wednesday that peace talks with Israel had stalled because Israel was not interested in achieving peace.
Israel’s demand for negotiations without conditions meant that it wanted to bring down the peace process, Assad said after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan in Damascus.
“We discussed today the ways to bring the peace process out of the deadlock that it has reached ... because of the absence of a serious Israeli partner who aims to achieve peace,” he told a joint news conference with Erdogan.
“When Israel says it wants negotiations without conditions it means it wants negotiations with no foundation. This is like having a building with no foundation, then it’s very easy to be brought down and they want to bring down the peace process,” he said.
Peace talks between Israel and Syria faltered in 2000 over Damascus’s demand for a full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.
Turkey last year facilitated contacts that focused on Syrian demands for a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights, and Israel’s accusations that Damascus was arming militants in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Those contacts failed to produce formal negotiations.
Relations between Turkey and Israel turned sour after Israel launched a three-week incursion into the Gaza Strip last December and Erdogan said Israel no longer trusted Turkey to mediate peace talks with Syria.
On Wednesday, Erdogan reiterated that Turkey remained committed to mediating peace talks.
Meanwhile, a German mediator on Wednesday gave Hamas Israel’s response to a proposed swap freeing hundreds of jailed Palestinians for captured soldier Gilad Shalit, and the Islamist group said it would need days to review the new draft.
Signalling a possible breakthrough, a Hamas official said he expected the group to send a delegation from the Gaza Strip to Damascus yesterday to meet exiled Hamas leaders.
Israeli Security Minister Eli Yishai reiterated Israel’s misgivings over a prisoner amnesty likely to boost Hamas.
“We always say ‘not at any price’ because otherwise our enemies would exploit it. But on the other hand, we have to make every possible effort,” Yishai told Israel’s Army Radio. “Where is the middle ground? I think any further [public] words about this would be excessive.”
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
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Flooding in Vietnam has killed at least 10 people this week as the water level of a major river near tourist landmarks reached a 60-year high, authorities said yesterday. Vietnam’s coastal provinces, home to UNESCO world heritage site Hoi An ancient town, have been pummeled by heavy rain since the weekend, with a record of up to 1.7m falling over 24 hours. At least 10 people have been killed, while eight others are missing, the Vietnamese Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment said. More than 128,000 houses in five central provinces have been inundated, with water 3m deep in some areas. People waded through
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