Israel has told the Palestinians to forget the 1967 boarders and accept the Separation Wall that cuts through West Bank as the border of a future Palestinian state.
Israeli negotiators made this announcement just hours before US Secretary of State John Kerry’s arrival for top-level talks on ongoing direct peace negotiations.
‘Israel’s opening position was that the border be the route of the separation barrier, and not the 1967 lines as the Palestinians have demanded,’ Israeli public radio said in a report.
Since the talks began in late July, ending a three-year freeze, the Palestinians have repeatedly complained about Israel’s lack of clarity on the issue of borders.
The Palestinians insist the talks be based on the lines that existed before the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel seized Gaza, the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem.
But Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has rejected any return to the 1967 lines as ‘indefensible’, saying that would not take into account the ‘demographic changes on the ground’ over the past 46 years, in a clear euphemism for Jewish settlements.
Israel began work on its sprawling ‘security fence’ in 2002 at the height of the second intifada, and has defended its construction as a crucial protective measure, pointing to a drop in attacks inside Israel as proof of its success.
But the Palestinians, who refer to it as the ‘apartheid wall,’ say the barrier is a land grab, pointing out that when complete, 85 per cent of it will have been built inside the West Bank.
There was no confirmation of the report from Netanyahu’s office, which has refused to comment on the content of the ongoing peace talks in line with a US-requested media blackout.
Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who oversaw the start of the barrier’s construction, repeatedly insisted that the barrier was not a border for a future Palestinian state but only a measure to keep out suicide bombers.
When construction began, Israel resisted calls to route it along the so-called Green Line, which acted as a de facto border between 1949, when fighting ended after Israel was established, and the 1967 war.
In 2004, the International Court of Justice issued a non-binding opinion declaring the barrier contrary to international law, which was ignored by Israel.
Another issue that arose in the current talks was the possibility of a ‘shared area’ in Jerusalem, which would be accessible to both sides, the two press reports said, suggesting the idea had sparked a disagreement within the Israeli team over the size of such a zone.
Kerry’s arrival in the region comes as a growing number of voices on both sides spoke of an impending crisis in the fledgling talks.
Israeli press reports have mooted a new US approach that would see Washington presenting the sides with a proposal for an interim agreement.
Kerry has flatly denied the existence of any new plan saying, ‘Let me categorically dispel any notion that there is anything other than the track that is formally engaged in between Israel and the Palestinians.
‘There is no other plan at this point in time,’ he told reporters in Riyadh.
However a Western source quoted by the Maariv daily on Tuesday said Washington had ‘not yet’ drafted a position paper.
Meanwhile Israel has completed DNA tests to identify the bodies of 36 Palestinian fighters held in Israeli custody, a spokesperson from a campaign to retrieve the bodies said.
Salim Khilla from the Palestinian national campaign to restore martyrs bodies said on Tuesday that relatives of the fighters traveled to the Tayba crossing in Tulkarem to give DNA samples which Israel will match with the remains of the bodies it holds in custody.
The results will be announced in two to eight weeks, at which point Israel is expected to return the fighters in groups.
In August, the Palestinian Authority refused to receive the remains of Palestinian fighters held by Israel because its request for DNA testing was denied.
Since the 1960s, Israel has withheld the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians, interred in numbered, rather than named, graves in a cemetery in the occupied West Bank’s Jordan Valley.
The PA is aware of at least 288 Palestinian bodies being held by Israel, Khilla said, despite Israel claiming it only has 80 bodies.
Also this week, 20 Palestinian prisoners were injured on Tuesday after Israeli forces suppressed a protest following the death of inmate Hassan Turabi, who died on Tuesday morning at Afula Medical Centre.
Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails declared a day of mourning for Turabi and sent back meals provided by the Israeli Prison Service, the PA Ministry of Prisoners said.
Prisoners also refused to take daily breaks in the prison yard.
Israeli prison guards attacked detainees in Megiddo prison who were protesting over Turabi’s death, injuring at least 20 detainees, the PA Ministry of Prisoners said.
Detainees being held in Nafta jail launched a two-day hunger strike in response to the death, while lawyers who work for the PA Ministry of Prisoners boycotted Israeli courts in protest against Israel’s ‘systematic’ medical negligence.
The PLO on Tuesday released a statement calling for an international investigation into the conditions of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
Turabi died after suffering from leukemia and had been transferred from Megiddo prison to Afula Medical Centre for medical treatment.
PA minister of prisoners’ affairs Issa Qaraqe said Israel’s Prison Service was responsible for the death of Turabi and accused them of ‘negligence.’
Qaraqe said that the negligence had started at Megiddo prison and ten days before Turabi was transferred to Afula hospital he had severe bleeding and started to vomit blood.
Turabi’s body arrived at Rafedia Hospital in Nablus to be transferred to the village of Sarra where a funeral procession will take place following afternoon prayers.
Turabi’s death brings the death toll among Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s custody to 205 since 1967, Qaraqe said.
The internationally recognised Palestinian territories of which the West Bank and East Jerusalem form a part have been occupied by the Israeli military since 1967.
• An Israeli military court at Ofer detention centre on Monday sentenced a young Palestinian man to a month in jail after he was found guilty of making an ‘illegal phone call,’ according to a Palestinian prisoners group.
Twenty-one-year-old Musab Nidal Zghayyar from Hebron was jailed on charges of talking to a Hamas dignitary over the phone, according to a statement released by Ahrar Centre for Prisoners Studies and Human Rights on Tuesday.
Zghayyar studies journalism and media at Hebron university and was detained in a midnight raid on his home by Israeli forces on Oct. 28.
The statement highlighted that the Israeli occupation treated the phone call as ‘threat’ to Israel’s security.
‘The occupation (authorities) fabricate various charges and excuses in an attempt to avoid responsibility for its arrests of university students.
These arrests deliberately block their educational paths,’ Fuad al-Khuffash, the centre’s director, said.
He also highlighted that the majority of detainees since the beginning of November have been students and called for their ‘immediate release.’
In September, 23-year-old Razi Nabulsi from Haifa was detained by Israeli police for posts he made on Facebook.
A Palestinian citizen of Israel, Nabulsi was detained for nearly a week for ‘incitement,’ but Israeli authorities refused to specify which posts had led to the detention and instead kept the evidence secret.
Reporters Without Borders ranked Israel 112th in the world for press freedom in its 2013 report, arguing that while Israeli journalists enjoy freedom of expression, there are major structural barriers related to military control and security issues that prevent a free press more generally.