Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday as Israel approved new homes in a West Bank settlement, potentially hampering US efforts to persuade Abbas to resume peace talks.
His meeting with Abbas in the Jordanian capital Amman was Kerry’s second in as many days. It was to be followed, according to a Palestinian official, by a briefing on the US proposals that Abbas will give to other PLO leaders on Thursday ahead of a decision on whether they should resume negotiations with Israel. Neither US nor Palestinian officials have given details of the discussions between Abbas and Kerry, who is making his sixth visit to the region since he took office in February.
Israel has also said little this week but announced a step that clashed with US peace efforts. The state granted initial approval on Wednesday for the construction of 732 new homes in Modiin Ilit, a settlement midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. “These are very preliminary stages,” an Israeli spokeswoman said after the planning committee of Israel’s military-run Civil Administration in the occupied West Bank gave the green light for the project. “Any more advanced stages require the approval of the Defence Ministry.”
Abbas has said settlement expansion must stop before negotiations that collapsed in 2010 over the issue can resume. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called on him to return to talks unconditionally. A positive Palestinian decision, if one were to emerge on Thursday or soon thereafter, would be the first tangible sign of progress in Kerry’s nearly six-month drive to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, now largely overshadowed by upheaval in Egypt and civil war in Syria. “The president will present the offer made to him by Kerry in order to make a decision about it,” Wasel Abu Youssef, a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official, told Reuters in Ramallah of Abbas’ plan to brief PLO colleagues on Thursday. Palestinians also want deliberations on a future state to be based on lines that existed before Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war.