GAZA CITY/RAMALLAH, 7 October 2007 — Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas government in Gaza, yesterday urged Arab leaders not to attend the US-hosted international peace conference in the fall.
In an interview with the Falasteen newspaper, Haniyeh said: “We are going to appeal directly to Arab brothers, mainly the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to reconsider any decision to participate in this conference.”
Haniyeh said he did not expect any concrete result from the conference as Israel had stuck to its stance on Jerusalem, the return of refugees and the 1967 borders.
“The Palestinians did not build much hope on the previous Oslo agreements,” Haniyeh said in the interview with the pro-Hamas daily, referring to the interim peace accords reached in the mid-1990s. “Therefore, we are not going to build any hope on the results of this conference,” he said.
Hamas issued a similar appeal late last month. Hamas has tried to stay on good terms with the Arab world.
The United States has not yet set a date for the conference or announced a list of participants. Both depend, in part, on how much progress Israeli and Palestinian teams will make in drafting a joint declaration of principles that would guide future talks on a final peace deal. The conference is to endorse such a document, and possibly relaunch peace talks that broke down in January 2001.
The head of the Palestinian negotiating team, Ahmed Qorei, said yesterday that if a joint Israeli-Palestinian statement was not formulated before the conference, the Palestinians might not participate in it.
He added that both teams would hold their first meeting tomorrow to draft a joint statement ahead of the conference.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minster Ehud Olmert, during their meeting on Wednesday in Jerusalem, gave a green light to the negotiating teams to start working on the joint statement.
Qorei, who is a member of Fatah’s Central Committee and a former Palestinian Authority prime minister, told Palestinian media that the two sides should agree before the summit, which Israeli officials say is set for Nov. 26, on a timetable for implementing agreements.
He also said that the principles of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are clear to both sides, and now they simply must be worded into a serious, unambiguous document.
Qorei said that the internal Palestinian stalemate between his movement and Hamas “can no longer be allowed to prevent the resolution of the Palestinian issue.”
He warned that there was no room for confusion regarding the key issues of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. “It is vital that in the next few days we reach agreements on these issues, which include Jerusalem, refugees, borders, water, settlements and prisoners.”
According to Israeli political sources, the statement may include references to the core issues of a final-status agreement on the establishment of a Palestinian state, but such references would be noncommittal, and the statement will deal only with issues that enjoy clear agreement.
The parties differ greatly on the results they would like the conference to yield, with Abbas looking for agreement on core issues while Olmert seeks a vague statement of interests.
Israeli officials said the statement would be “significant enough but general enough to avoid a blow-up or crisis.”
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is to arrive in Israel and the Palestinian territories next week to see if a joint statement can include the core issues.
from
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=102138&d=7&m=10&y=2007
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