Abbas will not seek re-election without peace talks, official warns

Ramallah - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will not seek re-election in January if there is no credible peace process with Israel, a senior Palestinian official said Wednesday. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that if Israel did not stop all construction in West Bank settlements, then there was no chance of resuming peace negotiations. Peace talks were broken off in December as Israel headed into new elections. The moderate Abbas, whose platform centres on peace negotiations with Israel, would then see no point in running for a second term, Erekat warned in a news conference in Ramallah. Moderate Palestinians would have to search for an alternative to peace negotiations, he warned, arguing - in a clear message to Israel and the US - that Palestinian support for a one-state solution to the conflict, rather than one of two states, would gain ground. Erekat expressed anger at US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's praise for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has offered the Palestinians a temporary moratorium on Israeli construction in the West Bank, which would however exclude East Jerusalem, as well as some 3,000 housing units already in the pipelines within existing settlement blocs. 'A settlement freeze is a settlement freeze,' he said. 'There are no half solutions.' The Palestinians also want to resume negotiations from where they ended under Netanyahu's predecessor, Ehud Olmert, he reiterated. He rejected as insufficient US letters of assurances sent to the Palestinians and Arab states, which he said inked Washington's position that Israel's settlements are illegal and that East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory as well. 'We urged the Arab countries not to accept the US letters of assurances as grounds to pressure us to return to negotiations,' said Erekat. 'Our problem is not with the US. Our problem is with Israel. We cannot cash these letters anywhere.' Abbas' West Bank-based administration had called for an urgent meeting of the Arab Follow-up Committee of the Arab League to discuss what he called the 'new' US position on the settlements and the resumption of negotiations. The Palestinians, he argued, had made a mistake when they agreed to hold negotiations with Israel in the past without demanding a settlement freeze, which he said was an Israeli obligation under the 2003 international 'road map' plan, not a Palestinian condition. 'We made a mistake. Every US president told us that with negotiations we will reach the two-state solution. This time we want to see facts on the ground,' he said.