Trieste, Italy - The world's major powers want to revive
direct peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians this year, top
negotiators said Friday during talks in the Italian port of Trieste.
'We hope that we will be able to move into real and productive
negotiations (between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world) in
the near future,' the United States special envoy to the Middle East,
George Mitchell, said.
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that 'We the world,
we the Arab League, we the parties, we the UN Security Council ...
want to achieve full-fledged resumption of direct negotiations on the
peace process between the parties themselves.'
Russia is planning to host a conference on the Middle East peace
process later in the year, making Lavrov an important broker in the
bid to restart the peace process.
The comments came as the foreign ministers of the world's eight
leading industrialized powers (G8) held talks in Trieste. The quartet
of Middle East negotiators - the European Union, Russia, the US and
the UN - met on the sidelines of those talks.
In their meetings, both bodies called on Israel to stop building
or expanding settlements in Palestinian territory and urged it to
ease its blockade of the Gaza Strip.
'The only viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
one that ends the occupation that began in 1967 and fulfils the
aspirations of both parties independent homelands through two states
for two peoples,' the quartet joint statement said.
They also urged Palestinians to renounce violence and recognize
Israel's right to exist, with the G8 statement calling for an
'unequivocal end to violence and terrorism.'
And they called on the international community to do more to help
rebuild the Palestinian economy, especially in Gaza, where much of
the area was wrecked in Israel's January invasion.
'We are all worried that we support Gaza and then there's a
further outbreak of conflict, but the best way of preventing that ...
is to help the people, because that is the way of preventing
extremism gaining ground,' quartet special envoy Tony Blair said.
'The one thing that I've learned in the last two years is that you
can never separate politics and security and economics - they go
together, and the West Bank and Gaza are going to be one Palestinian
state, not two,' he said.
The G8 and formal quartet meetings were the first of their kind to
follow the inauguration of US President Barack Obama, an event which
gave rise to hopes for a breakthrough in the Middle East.
Earlier on Friday, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini hailed
the new unity between Obama's administration and the EU on the Middle
East peace process, saying that the two powers were closer together
than ever before on the issue.
The G8 is made up of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy,
Japan, Russia and the US. Italy currently holds its rotating
presidency.
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