TRIESTE: Pressure grew on Israel yesterday to take concrete steps for peace as both the diplomatic Quartet and the Group of Eight called for the Jewish state to halt West Bank settlements.
“We are urging Israeli authorities to stop settlements including natural (demographic) growth,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told a news conference. “This will be the first beginning to make sure all our proposals are implemented,” he said.
The Quartet met in the northeastern Italian city of Trieste to try to jumpstart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Just hours earlier the Group of Eight leading world powers, also meeting in Trieste, made the same appeal, calling “on both parties to fulfill their obligations under the road map, including a freeze on settlement activity.” The international community considers the settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Israel seized in the 1967 war, to be illegal.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who attended both talks in Trieste, said: “We want to achieve full-fledged resumption of direct negotiations between the parties themselves on all tracks.” Tony Blair, the Quartet’s Middle East envoy, called for “major change on the West Bank... transformative progress” beyond the easing of access and movement for Palestinians in the occupied territory. “What is necessary at the same time as we make a big push politically for the two-state solution is that that push... is supported by what is happening on the ground,” the former British prime minister said. The Quartet’s declaration also called for “an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism,” calling on the Palestinian Authority to “continue to make every effort to improve law and order and to fight violent extremism.”
Ban, noting the change of government in both Israel and the United States this year, said: “We are trying very hard to seize on the very favorable political atmosphere” following US President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, which he described as “quite a historic and powerful statement.”
Obama has bluntly called for Israel to halt settlement activity while urging Arabs to move closer to making peace with Israel in the speech on June 4.
Meanwhile, Israeli officials played down reports yesterday that a deal was close with Hamas that would include the release of an Israeli soldier held captive in the Gaza Strip in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
Israeli and Palestinian political sources and Western diplomats confirmed, however, that Egyptian mediators were still working on a package of measures that could combine exchanges of prisoners, cease-fire agreements, an easing of Israel’s blockade on Gaza and rapprochement between rival Palestinian factions.
