JERUSALEM: Israel does not expect Palestinians to wage a new uprising if US-backed peace talks launched this month fail, its top general said yesterday.
We are ready for all options," Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi, chief of staff of the armed forces, told a parliamentary committee, according to an official who briefed reporters on the session. But Ashkenazi added, referring to a Palestinian uprising that began a decade ago: "If the talks were to fail, we do not forsee that we would return to the situation in which we found ourselves in September 2000.
More than 500 Israeli civilians died in 140 Palestinian suicide bomb attacks from 2000 to 2007. More than 4,500 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the same period. The Palestinians have threatened to drop out of the direct talks, launched on Sept. 2 with US backing, unless Israel extends a 10-month moratorium, expiring at the end of the month, on housing in its settlements in the occupied West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he would not extend the limited freeze, despit
e international pressure to do so.
Among Palestinians in the West Bank, there appears to be little appetite for widescale anti-Israeli violence should negotiations be halted, and many question what the last Intifada, or uprising, achieved. The area, where Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority holds sway, is enjoying economic growth and Palestinian security forces have been praised by Israel for taking measures to curb militants. But the settlement issue has long stoked Palestinian anger. They view settlements, built on land Israel captured in a 1967 Middle East war and which they want as part of a future state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as a threat to establishing a viable and contiguous country.
Netanyahu has said Israel could limit some construction but he has resisted declaring any new official ban, a move that could shake the governing coalition, which is dominated by pro-settler parties including his own right-wing Likud.
Some 500,000 Israelis live in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, which Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 conflict. The areas are home to 2.5 million Palestinians.
Later in the day, the Quartet of Middle East peace mediators will call on Israel to extend the moratorium, saying the measure has had a positive impact as the two sides seek to resolve major issues of their conflict within a year, according to a draft statement seen by Reuters. The group-the main guarantor of any future Middle East peace deal-is comprised of the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations. Settlements on land that Israel occupied in 1967 have been deemed illegal by the World Court, a finding the Israel disputes. - Reuters
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