|
US eager to speed up ME peace
14/01/2007 13:36 - (SA)
Ramallah - US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said after talks with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas Sunday that Washington was committed to accelerating progress on the dormant roadmap to Middle East peace.
"The US is deeply committed to find ways to accelerate progress on the roadmap," Rice told a joint press conference the West Bank town of Ramallah.
"The US is absolutely committed to helping find a solution" to the decades-old conflict and to building on what she called "the momentum currently in Israeli-Palestinian relations to build on a political horison."
Rice, who arrived in the region saying that she did not have a specific peace plan, did not offer any concrete steps to breathing life into the the internationally-drafted roadmap which has remained largely moribund since its launch nearly four years ago.
Abbas he hoped Rice's visit be "the beginning of negotiations that will lead to a halt of the war in our region and to the establishment of a Palestinian state."
He also said his administration was committed to ending deadly factional violence in the volatile Gaza Strip, where clashes between his Fatah party and the governing Hamas movement have killed more than 30 people in the last month.
"We will exert our utmost efforts to impose law and order and to boost the legal security forces," he said.
Abbas also reiterated that if talks with Hamas over forming a national unity government failed to bear fruit, "we will go back to the people of Palestine to hold early legislative and presidential elections."
His call on December 16 for early elections, which was rejected by the ruling Hamas movement, sparked the deadly factional fighting.
Rice arrived in Jerusalem Saturday on her third visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories in four months.
- AFP
|
News
