Kerry, Erekat to meet on stalled peace talks

Amid tense ties between Israel and the United States, top US diplomat John Kerry will meet the chief Palestinian negotiator Monday to discuss how to advance the frozen peace process.

Kerry will welcome a Palestinian delegation, lead by Saeb Erekat, to the State Department for discussions on “the way forward” in a Middle East peace deal and the situation in the Gaza Strip, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters Friday.

The Palestinian Authority has said it intends to present a resolution to the UN Security Council shortly, demanding a timetable for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines and the establishment of a Palestinian state — a move the US would likely veto given its traditional insistence on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for statehood. Peace talks collapsed in the spring amid bitter Israeli-Palestinian recriminations. A summer Israel-Hamas war, and Hamas’s refusal to disarm in Gaza following the conflict, further dimmed peace hopes.

Kerry would also discuss “lowering tensions in Jerusalem” with the Palestinian team, Psaki said.

Minor clashes erupted in the West Bank Friday after weekly Muslim prayers, while security forces deployed heavily around Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque in the Temple Mount compound. Police reopened the compound to Muslim worshippers having closed it Thursday after a Palestinian man, Mutaz Hijazi, the main suspect in the Wednesday shooting of Rabbi Yehudah Glick, was killed in the mixed Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Tor.

Al-Aqsa, in the Old City, and adjacent neighborhoods have seen months of violence, and the mosque compound has been a rallying point for Palestinians.

Israel had ordered Thursday’s rare and brief closure of the Temple Mount compound, sacred to both Muslims and Jews, because of fears of further violence.

Earlier this week, top US officials were forced onto the defensive after a magazine published scathing anonymous comments from someone in the Obama administration describing the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “chickenshit.”

Kerry denounced the comments as “disgraceful, unacceptable and damaging,” saying they did not represent the views of President Barack Obama or his cabinet.

The report was yet another blow to shaky US-Israel ties, which have seriously frayed since Kerry’s bid to broker a peace treaty collapsed in April, and over disagreements on a potential deal between Iran and the P5+1 world powers on Tehran’s nuclear program.