JERUSALEM: United States U.N. Ambassador Suan Rice meets Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad

Record ID: 643946

  • Title: JERUSALEM: United States U.N. Ambassador Suan Rice meets Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad
  • Date: 22nd October 2009
  • Summary: JERUSALEM (OCTOBER 22, 2009) (REUTERS) U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS SUSAN RICE DISEMBARKING VEHICLE/GREETING JOURNALISTS CAR CARRYING PALESTINIAN PRIME MINISTER SALAM FAYYAD ENTERING U.S. CONSULATE COMPOUND FAYYAD DISEMBARKING VEHICLE/APPROACHING RICE/LEADERS SHAKING HANDS AND ENTERING BUILDING
  • Embargoed: 6th November 2009 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Reuters ID: LVA37EQIEVZWUYHHPP0JY4631FO9
  • Story Text: U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice held on Thursday (October 22) a meeting with Palestinian Prime minister Salam Fayyad, in an effort to push forward stalled peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
    Rice is visiting the region as representative of U.S President Barack Obama.
    In a speech in Jerusalem on Wednesday (October 21) to an international conference of technological leaders, Rice urged both sides to move the procedural disputes to the peace table.
    Palestinians suspended peace talks in December, when Israel launched a war against Hamas Islamists.
    Also on Wednesday, Israeli officials said U.S. President Barack Obama's Middle East envoy is close to a deal with Israel on terms for resuming peace talks with the Palestinians.
    Under the prospective deal the negotiations could be held on the basis of two decades-old U.N. Security Council resolutions, 242 and 338, another official said.
    Such a formula could be acceptable to Israel since it interprets those resolutions as falling short of a demand to withdraw from all of the West Bank, territory it captured in a 1967 war.
    Palestinians, who seek a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, hold that the resolutions, which call for "withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict", obliges Israel to return to pre-1967 lines.
    Washington apparently hopes to persuade Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to return to peace talks based on the resolutions, enabling each side to cleave to its own interpretation and avoid conceding diplomatic ground on borders before negotiations resume.
    However, Abbas has given no sign he has dropped a main Palestinian condition for a resumption of negotiations -- an Israeli settlement freeze in the West Bank in accordance with a 2003 U.S.-backed peace "road map" that charts a path to a Palestinian state.
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