A US proposal offering security and diplomatic incentives to Israel in exchange for a renewal of a freeze on the building of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank drew an angry response from several senior Israeli ministers at a Cabinet meeting on Sunday.
Four Cabinet members from the right-wing Likud party opposed Washington’s initiative, in what Israeli media described as heated discussions.
The Palestinian Authority also said that it had not been informed.
“We haven’t heard anything official from the Americans,” said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator. “We are waiting for them to contact us.”
The US has reportedly offered Israel a long-term security agreement, which includes the delivery of 20 F-35 fighter jets worth US$3 billion. Washington also vowed to veto any UN security council resolution that could be damaging for Israel.
In return, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is supposed to announce a three-month extension of a settlement building freeze in the West Bank and agree to start talking about the borders of a future Palestinian state. The idea is that once the borders are settled, it will be easier to decide where building can continue and where it can’t.
After Sunday’s fractious Cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said the proposal was not final.
Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon was quoted as saying the US proposal was a “honey trap that will plunge us into another crisis.”
Israeli Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom and a prominent member of Netanyahu’s party, reportedly said during Sunday’s Likud meeting “it isn’t just about the three months; it’s about a process that will eventually determine our permanent borders.”
About 300,000 Jewish settlers live in the occupied West Bank. Another 200,000 live in East Jerusalem, which was annexed by Israel after the 1967 war and which Palestinians view as the capital of their future state.
Palestinian officials on Sunday voiced their objections to a plan that does not include an end to Jewish construction in East Jerusalem.
Direct talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis resumed in September under US auspices. A few weeks after the launching of the talks, a 10-month Israeli building moratorium expired. Since then, Israel has consistently refused to extend the building freeze.
The Palestinian Authority has made clear that it will not hold direct talks as long as building continues in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. It argues that the ever growing presence of Jewish settlers undermines the viability of any future Palestinian state.
Analysts believe that Netanyahu will find it difficult to obtain an agreement from his coalition on any kind of freeze. Several members of his Cabinet have repeatedly opposed any further limitation on settlement expansion, including Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, himself a settler.
“We will not accept any freeze — not for three months, not for two months and not for a single day,” said Lieberman during a tour of the Golan Heights on Thursday.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency