Rice Says Talks Should Resume Quickly
By ANNE GEARAN
Associated Press
March 4, 2008
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushed hard Tuesday to resume Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, despite the chaos and violence of a week that saw both Palestinian and Israeli civilians killed.
Walking away from talks plays into the hands of militants, the U.S. envoy said. She blamed Palestinian Hamas radicals for provoking an Israeli military onslaught in the Gaza Strip. The campaign has derailed an already troubled U.S-backed drive for peace terms this year.
''Negotiations are going to have to be able to withstand the efforts of rejectionists to upset them, to create chaos and violence, so that people react by deciding not to negotiate, '' Rice said in Egypt at the start of two days of efforts to rescue negotiations. ''That's the game of those who don't want to see a Palestinian state established.''
The moderate, U.S.-backed Palestinian leadership in the West Bank suspended peace talks in protest after an Israeli military offensive that killed more than 100 Palestinians in Gaza. That made restoring two-way talks Rice's chief objective for a trip she had planned to check up on the negotiators' progress.
Israel launched the offensive to stop rocket attacks by the Hamas militant groups on nearby Israeli cities, but the assault prompted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to suspend negotiations.
''The people who are firing rockets do not want peace,'' Rice told reporters in Cairo. ''They sow instability, that is what Hamas is doing.''
Rice backed Israel's right to respond to the rocket fire, but said it must avoid causing civilian casualties.
''The rocket attacks against innocent Israelis in their cities need to stop. This can't go on. No Israeli government can tolerate that,'' she said. But the Israelis ''need to be aware of the effects of these operations on innocent people.''
She said Hamas, which took over the Gaza Strip last July, is armed ''in part'' by Iran and underlined the need for the United States and the West to train and develop the Palestinian security forces loyal to Abbas, whose government controls the West Bank.
''Hamas gets armed by the Iranians and if nobody helps to improve the security capabilities of the legitimate Palestinian Authority security forces. That's not a very good situation,'' she said at a news conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit.
Rice said she still thinks the two sides can reach a deal for Palestinian statehood this year.
''I do think that negotiations ought to resume as soon as possible,'' Rice told reporters Monday on her way to the Middle East. ''I understand that the situation has been complicated. But the longer the negotiations are not ongoing or the longer that they are suspended, if that's what one wants to call it, the more it is a victory for those who don't want to see a two-state solution.''
Rice declined to call for a cease-fire, which many Israelis think would legitimize Hamas and its hold in Gaza. The Mediterranean coastal strip is the smaller, poorer of two Arab tracts that would form an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
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