GAZA Premier Ismail Haniya said Sunday that the Palestinian Authority’s decision to resume direct negotiations reflects a failed policy, and will not succeed.
Speaking at Al-Khulafa Ar-Rashidin mosque in Jabaliya, Haniya said that negotiations would not restore rights or religious sites, and said the Palestinian people ‘should trust God, who will be an ally of the Palestinians’.
The Gaza prime minister further said the Palestinian people were a ‘model for the Arab nations and Islamic countries’, given their steadfastness through years of siege.
On Saturday, Hamas indefinitely postponed a meeting with Fatah officials in Gaza City to discuss a unity deal over the PLO’s decision to re-enter direct negotiations with Israel.
Senior Hamas official Salah Bardawil said the PLO’s decision has ‘made it too difficult’ for his movement to meet with Fatah officials.
Hamas was not the only Palestinian faction to denounce the PLO’s decision to relaunch talks with Israel at a US peace summit in September.
In Ramallah, the Palestinian Peoples’ Party’s politburo issued a statement Saturday saying that agreeing to negotiations with Israel would lead to ‘further fiasco’.
Hamas splinter group Al-Ahrar issued a statement calling the decision to return to talks a ‘subjugation to American decisions’.
Direct negotiations with Israel were derailed in December 2008, following Israel’s devastating assault on the Gaza Strip.
The PLO endorsed the return to talks on Friday, after the US invited Israeli and Palestinian leaders to relaunch talks in Washington in September.
Israel must extend its temporary moratorium on settlement construction in the occupied territories before Palestinians will engage in serious peace talks, the PLO’s chief negotiator said Monday.
Saeb Erekat told reporters in Ramallah that Israel should renew the slowdown when it comes up for review on September 26 and include occupied East Jerusalem in its mandate in addition to the West Bank.
Erekat and President Mahmud Abbas have accepted a US invitation to resume peace talks in Washington starting September 2, the first face-to-face talks since the PLO dropped out of negotiations after former Israeli premier Ehud Olmert launched a devastating military assault on the Gaza Strip in December 2008.
Abbas had previously insisted that negotiations would not resume unless Israel stopped building settlements and agreed a frame of reference for talks based on two states on the 1967 borders, which according to a broadly shared understanding of international law demarcate Israel from the Palestinian territories.
In a letter sent Sunday to the four parties of the so-called Mideast Quartet of states – the UN, EU, US and Russia – Abbas wrote that continued construction in the settlements would mean Israel had ‘decided to stop negotiations because talks cannot continue if settlements continue’.
Israel’s leadership has largely rebuffed these demands as ‘preconditions’ but did agree in November to temporarily freeze new construction in most West Bank settlements for a period of 10 months.
In Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke at length about the return to peace talks but did not mention whether he would extend the settlement moratorium that expires in September.
Speaking at his government’s weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu rejected the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel and said the foremost component of a peace agreement with the PLO was Israel’s national security.
Other initial components will be recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, he explained, adding that the right of return for Palestinian refugees ‘will be realised in the territory of the Palestinian state’.
The components requested by Netanyahu have been rejected in the past by Palestinian negotiators who have recognised Israel’s right to exist, but not as a state favouring one religious group over another.
The Arab League issued a statement responding to Netanyahu’s position and said it was ‘very concerned about the Israeli’s explanation for the basis of the negotiations’.
In the Gaza Strip, the prime minister of a Hamas-led government that has ruled the coastal enclave since 2007 said the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority’s decision to resume talks reflected a failed strategy.
Deposed prime minister Haniya told Muslim worshippers in the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya that negotiations would not restore their rights or religious sites.
Palestinians should instead ‘trust God, who will be an ally,’ Haniya explained.
l Palestinian combatants deported by Israel from Bethlehem to Gaza after a siege on the Church of the Nativity in 2002 met on Sunday with President Mahmud Abbas’ adviser Abdullah Al-Efranj in Gaza City to deliver an appeal on their behalf.
Deportee spokesman Fahmi Kan’an said the letter addressed the deportees’ return to Bethlehem and the need for Palestinian unity.
‘In the light of talks on resuming direct negotiations, we demand that the deportees’ cause be taken seriously, as we enter our ninth year in exile,’ the spokesman, who is among the deportees, said.
The letter included an appeal to help with travel arrangements for family members to visit the deportees in Gaza, who told the presidential adviser that relatives have been denied travel permits by Israeli authorities.
The Nativity Church deportees, both in Gaza and Europe, have launched several appeals to the Palestinian Authority for financial assistance following their exile. The terms of their deportation stipulate that they are not permitted to seek employment.
Twenty-six Palestinians who took refuge in the church were expelled to Gaza and 13 were expelled to Europe following Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, during which Israeli forces besieged the church and Bethlehem in a bid to locate Palestinian combatants.
• Israeli Major-General Yoav Galant’s most prominent characteristic as a military man is his tendency to choose offense over other combat approaches, Israeli electronic site Ynet reported on Monday.
According to Ynet: ‘Had it been up to him, Operation Cast Lead would have been launched a year to a year and a half earlier. He wouldn’t have waited until December 2009.’
Galant also attempted to convince Israeli Defense Minister Barak, Chief of Staff Ashkenazi, and his colleagues at General Staff Headquarters to implement an operational plan that was much broader and more ambitious than the one carried out in Operation Cast Lead.
His plan was supposed to not only put an end to the rockets directed at southern occupied territories, but also to terminate Hamas’ rule in Gaza.
Yet Galant’s proposals were rejected, by the Israeli defense minister among others, in favour of a relatively ‘thin’ operation limited in scope.
Barak took notice of Galant precisely because of the latter’s offensive approach.
The Israeli defence minister’s decision to recommend that the government appoint the general as the 20th chief of staff in Israeli army history conveys a clear, sharp message, says the Ynet report.
‘The State of Israel does not intend to remain idle and wait to be attacked by rockets, missiles, and possibly unconventional weapons.’
Should one of these strategic threats be realised, or be close to realisation, the Israeli army (IDF) will be utilised in ‘an offensive, decisive manner and in full force in order to thwart or minimize the threat’.
Ynet continues: ‘This message is aimed not only for the IDF and for Israel’s citizens, but also for states such as Syria and Iran, for Hezbollah, and for the US Administration and European states as well.’
