Palestinian Foreign Affairs Minister Riad Malki said on Thursday that the Palestinian leadership would not accept any US-backed peace arrangement that would undermine the rights of the Palestinian people.
Malki made the remarks ahead of a meeting between the US President Peace Envoy Jason Greenblatt and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in West Bank city of Ramallah.
“We are waiting to receive from the U.S. side an official formula, after which we will respond upon the meeting of the leadership and consultations,” he said.
He told Xinhua in an exclusive interview that the United States is “well aware of” the Palestinian position and that Palestinian leadership would not accept any peace arrangement that would “undermine the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people or the principles of international legitimacy acknowledged over the long years of conflict with Israel.”
Trump informed both Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during separate meetings on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meetings in New York earlier in September that the U.S. administration was working on a new peace initiative, but still needs time to formalize it.
Greenblatt arrived in the region Tuesday to hold talks with the Palestinian and Israeli sides in an attempt to revive the peace process that had been stalled since 2014 for multiple reasons, including the Israeli settlement activity.
Malki criticized statements Netanyahu made last Tuesday during a visit to Gush Etzion settlement bloc in the West Bank, celebrating the 50 years of the beginning of the settlement projects in which he said that settlements were made to stay and continue and that Israel would not remove any settlement in the future.
The Palestinian foreign minister said that Netanyahu “challenges the international law that asserts that the territories Israel occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem, are Palestinian territory.”
He added that Netanyahu “ignores international law and tries to override it and to tell the international community that it has to deal with the status quo, disregarding history, facts and international resolutions.”
“We refuse all that totally and urge the international community to have a clearer and more courageous position and to untie itself from the phenomena of fear in facing this austerity and breach of international law,” he said.
