Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that his country would not abandon its plans to build homes for Jews in disputed East Jerusalem during a visit of U.S. mediator George Mitchell.
On Friday Mitchell will meet with Netanyahu in Jerusalem and PNA leaders in Ramallah in a bid to restart the Israeli-Palestinian dialog, which stalled more than a year ago. Settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, both occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, has been the main obstacle to reviving peace negotiations.
"[Israeli construction] in Jerusalem will not be frozen... The peace process depends on one thing - on eliminating preconditions for the talks," the prime minister said in an interview with Israel's Channel Two.
Chief Palestinian presidential advisor Sahib Oreikat said, in his turn, that the Palestinian side waited for Israel's announcement on halting settlement construction "in order to return to the talks."
Israel's decision to build 1,600 new housing units for Jewish families in the disputed territory in East Jerusalem, announced during U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden's visit to Israel, has infuriated the U.S. as it poses a threat to the resumption of U.S.-backed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
Israel, which receives $2.4 billion of U.S. foreign aid every year, apologized for the bad timing of its announcement but has rejected the demand by the United States to scrap the new construction plans.
Under the internationally agreed roadmap for Middle East peace, Israel is obliged to freeze all settlement construction activity and remove unauthorized outposts built since 2001 from Palestinian territories.
TEL-AVIV / GAZA, April 23 (RIA Novosti)
