An Israeli decision to suspend snarled negotiations with the Palestinians has signalled the latest and perhaps the final blow to two decades of a mostly fruitless peace process. But the day after the U.S.-led talks were frozen amid mutual recrimination, no angry crowds gathered in the de-facto Palestinian capital Ramallah to urge a rethink and…
President Barack Obama said on Friday there might be a need for a “pause” in U.S.-brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, suggesting the faltering Middle East peace effort may be going nowhere. Israel on Thursday suspended participation in peace talks with the Palestinians in response to President Mahmoud Abbas’s unexpected unity pact with…
The Palestinians would extend the current peace negotiations if Israel agrees to a three-month settlement construction freeze during which the sides would agree on the borders of a future Palestinian state. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told Israeli journalists in Ramallah on Tuesday that he also would require Israel to release the fourth group of…
Ron Pundak, an Israeli historian who helped engineer the Oslo Accords, has died. Pundak, who died Friday of cancer at the age of 59, was an expert on Jordanian and Palestinian history who, through his contacts, began talks with Palestinian leaders in 1992 with the permission of Yossi Beilin, who was deputy foreign minister at…
The State Department said on Thursday that progress was being made in U.S.-mediated negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians meant to keep peace talks going, but denied reports from the region that there had been an agreement. “Our negotiating team and both parties remain in intensive negotiation. They had another meeting today. The gaps are…
What’s the fallback plan? That’s the question increasingly on the minds of Middle East policymakers and analysts as Secretary of State John Kerry struggles to save the Israeli-Palestinian peace process from collapse. For the Palestinians, the path forward in the event of a collapse is clear: They will seek international recognition as a state in…
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in September, President Barack Obama declared the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace one of the two main U.S. foreign policy priorities for his second term. Fast-forward to today, the Obama administration faces a stark choice: expend more energy on a faltering peace process or absorb the hit to an already-troubled…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered a halt to high-level contacts with the Palestinians on non-security related issues, but exempted his chief peace negotiator from the ban, government officials said on Wednesday. One Israeli official called Netanyahu’s order a response to “the Palestinians’ grave violation of their commitments in the framework of the peace…
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