UNITED NATIONS, Sept 27: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said that “time is running out” for Middle East peace efforts and urged world powers to rein in Israeli settlement construction that he warned could undermine US-sponsored negotiations.
In an address to an annual gathering of world leaders at the UN General Assembly, Abbas committed to negotiating with Israel in good faith but he also painted what he called a “dispiriting and bleak” picture for peace prospects.
Abbas’s assessment came one day after Secretary of State John Kerry suggested a more hopeful outlook, saying the two sides had agreed to intensify talks and increase the US role.
The resumption of long-dormant peace talks in July was an a/chievement for Kerry, but many Israelis and Palestinians – as well as independent experts are skeptical about the chances of reaching a peace deal in their decades-old conflict.
“Time is running out, and the window of peace is narrowing and the opportunities are diminishing,” Abbas said. “The current round of negotiations appears to be a last chance to realize a just peace.”
Abbas spoke at the United Nations for the first time in the official name of the State of Palestine. Over US and Israeli objections, the General Assembly last November voted to upgrade the Palestinians to “non-member state” from observer entity.
Abbas sought to assure Israelis that the raising of the Palestinians’ UN status was not meant to “delegitimize” Israel and he called on them to work with him to “sow the seeds of good neighborliness” between their peoples.
‘PRETEXTS AND OBSESSIONS’
But he also urged Israelis to abandon “exaggerated security pretexts and obsessions.” Israeli security concerns focus mainly on the Gaza Strip, where Hamas – a militant group sworn to Israel’s destruction – rules instead of Abbas’s mainstream Palestinian Authority.
Abbas reserved his toughest criticism for Jewish settlement building on occupied land that the Palestinians want for a state of their own, saying it “aims to change the facts on the ground” and has fractured the concept of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The United States is seeking to broker an agreement in which Israel would exist peacefully alongside a new Palestinian state created in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, lands captured by the Israelis in a 1967 war.
(AGENCIES)
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