Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested in an interview published yesterday that he would not seek to lure the Palestinians back to peace talks by renewing a freeze on settlement building.
“We already gave at the office,” Netanyahu told the Jerusalem Post, referring to a 10-month partial settlement freeze that expired in late September last year.
Peace talks with the Palestinians began nine months into the freeze, but ground to a halt shortly after the moratorium expired.
Netanyahu’s comments came after the international peacemaking Middle East Quartet called on both sides on Friday to return to peace talks within a month, with the goal of securing a deal before the end of next year.
However, the Palestinians say they will not hold talks while Israel builds on land they want for a future state, a position repeated by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday as he returned to the West Bank after submitting a bid for full UN membership in New York.
Netanyahu told the Post the settlement issue was a “pretext.”
“It is a pretext they use again and again, but I think a lot of people see it as a ruse to avoid direct negotiations,” he said.
And the Israeli leader said he had no intention of interfering with plans for the construction of 700 new homes in the East Jerusalem settlement neighborhood of Gilo.
“I don’t think there is anything new,” he said of the planned building.
“We plan in Jerusalem. We build in Jerusalem. Period. The same way Israeli governments have been doing for years — since the end of the 1967 war,” he added. “We build in Jewish neighborhoods, the Arabs build in Arab neighborhoods — that is the way the life of this city goes on and develops for its Jewish and non-Jewish residents alike.”
Netanyahu told the Jerusalem Post the crux of the failure of talks lay in the refusal of the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
“Of course it matters — this is what this conflict is all about. It is not about the settlements; it is about the Jewish state. And it must be said over and over again,” he said.
The prospect of a new settlement freeze is also anathema to much of Netanyahu’s right-wing governing coalition, with hawkish Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman vocally opposed.
Netanyahu was due to meet yesterday with the Group of Eight, a grouping of his Cabinet ministers, to discuss the Quartet’s peace talks proposal, Israeli radio reported.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS