GAZA/RAMALLAH: Palestinian leaders on Wednesday called for international pressure on Israel and support for their unilateral moves toward statehood after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s election win.

Netanyahu’s surprise victory, after pledging in the final days of the campaign that there would be no Palestinian state as long as he was in power, left Palestinians grim about prospects for a negotiated solution to a decades-old conflict.

“It is clear Israel has voted for burying the peace process, against the two-state choice and for the continuation of occupation and settlement,” Saeb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator in talks with Israel that collapsed in April, told Voice of Palestine radio.

Seeking to shore up right-wing votes and saying that militants would move into any territory relinquished by Israel, Netanyahu also vowed to keep building settlements on occupied land Palestinians seek for a state.

Palestinian leaders said a fourth term for the Likud party leader meant they must press forward with unilateral steps toward independence, including filing charges against Israel at the International Criminal Court.

“This makes it more necessary than ever to go to the international community, and to go to the ICC and escalate peaceful resistance and boycott against the occupation,” Wasel Abu Youssef, a Palestine Liberation Organization leader, told Reuters.

The Palestinians are due to become ICC members on April 1.

Erekat called in a statement on the international community to back Palestinian efforts “to internationalize our struggle for dignity and freedom through the International Criminal Court and through all other peaceful means.”

In the West Bank city of Ramallah, taxi driver Zeyad Maaly said Palestinians should now rise up against Israel in the occupied territory.

“There will never be peace, not even in dreams,” he said.

Ismail Ahmed, who drives a taxi in Hamas-run Gaza, where Israel and Palestinian militant groups fought a 50-day war last summer, said Palestinians should now put aside their differences and join in a common front against Israel.

“This is the only way we can make them recognize us,” Ahmed said.

The Arab League chief dismissed Wednesday as electioneering Netanyahu’s vow to rule out a Palestinian state, saying there would be global pressure for a peace deal.

Nabil Elaraby put the premier’s statements down to “electioneering.”

Netanyahu’s statements would “not be the policies of the future Israeli government,” said the secretary general of the 22-nation bloc in an interview with AFP, adding: “we will have to wait and see.”

“I believe personally that he made that statement about... no two states to gain the votes of the extremists, particularly those Russian immigrants who went to Israel in the last 10, 15 years,” Elaraby said.

Elaraby said he expected stalled peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which broke down last year amid mutual recriminations, to resume after the next Israeli government is formed.

“I think there will be enough pressure on any Israeli government that the situation as it is cannot continue; Israel is going to be a pariah,” he said.