US decries settlement activity, confirms Indyk headed to Israel
Special envoy to meet with diplomatic officials in Jerusalem before going to Jericho for another round of discussions
Washington criticized Israel for a recent move to support settlements, and confirmed that its new Mideast peace envoy will be in Jerusalem and Jericho next week for a second round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Thursday that Martin Indyk and deputy special envoy Frank Lowenstein would travel to the region to facilitate talks to craft a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
On Wednesday, sources in Jerusalem told The Times of Israel that Indyk, who was hand-picked by US President Barack Obama to be Washington’s point man at the talks, was scheduled to meet with officials from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Foreign Ministry, and members of Justice Minister Tzipi Livni’s negotiating team.
Earlier this month, the cabinet expanded its list of West Bank settlements eligible for government subsidies, a decision that came just days after the resumption of the long-frozen peace talks. The cabinet approved a range of housing subsidies and loans for more than 600 Israeli communities deemed “national priority areas.” The list includes poor towns in Israel’s outlying areas as well as dozens of settlements.
Psaki said US officials were speaking with the Israeli government to express US concern about these settlements.
“We do not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement activity and oppose any efforts to legitimize settlement outposts,” Psaki said. “The secretary has made clear that he believes both of the negotiating teams are at the table in good faith and are committed to working together to make progress.”
Meanwhile, a ministerial committee tasked with overseeing the release of 104 Palestinian prisoners — a confidence-building gesture by Israel to ease the talks — is set to meet for the first time on Sunday.
The five members of the panel will decide on the identity of the 25 prisoners to be released in the first of four phased releases, all of whom have been imprisoned since before the 1993 Oslo peace accords.
The committee that will handle the prisoner release process is composed of Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, Livni, Science Minister Yaakov Peri and Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch. It will decide which prisoners on the list of 104 will go free at what stage, determine whether they will be allowed to return to their homes or be sent abroad, and oversee the implementation.
Last month the cabinet approved the prisoner releases, which were a Palestinian precondition for peace talks, and while the decision was widely pilloried by politicians on the right and the Israeli public, Netanyahu said it was for the “good of the country.”
Earlier this week, the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, declared that the first batch of prisoners would be released by mid-August. Livni said that another round of peace talks would be held in Israel by the second week of August after negotiations were restarted in Washington at the end of last month. Livni noted that some prisoners would already have been released by the time the second round of talks commenced.
On the Palestinian side, all Palestinian factions belonging to the PLO with the exception of Fatah have refused to take part in a committee to oversee negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian due to their principled rejection of negotiations, the London-based daily A-Sharq Al-Awsat reported on Wednesday.
One week ahead of the resumption of negotiations in Jerusalem, no Palestinian oversight committee is yet in place, senior Palestinian sources told the daily.
“This committee was meant to be headed by President Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] and include the secretary generals of the factions as well as a few members of the [PLO] Executive Committee. But all the factions in the PLO refused; the Democratic Front, the Popular Front, the People’s Party, and others,” a source was quoted as saying.