Abbas considers options on peace talks restart

RAMALLAH (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is considering his options on resuming indirect peace talks with Israel after meeting US and European diplomats this week, a senior aide said Friday.
We have asked for an official meeting of Arab ministers of the follow-up committee and have told them that our consultations, coordinations and inquiries are still ongoing with the Americans, Europeans, Russians and the UN, chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters.
Erekat dismissed an Israeli newspaper report Friday that Abbas had told Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger at a meeting this week in Ramallah that US-mediated peace talks could resume in the coming days.
The Haaretz report said Spindelegger told Israeli officials he had heard from Abbas of his readiness to resume talks. The one who announces the Palestinian position is the Palestinian side, not Haaretz or the Austrian Foreign Minister, Erekat said.
An Israeli diplomatic source in Jerusalem said: There is no official word from the Americans or the Palestinians but there have been all kinds of messages from Western diplomats indicating that talks could restart.
There was no comment from Vienna. Meanwhile, Israeli forces on Friday fired teargas at stone-throwing youths during a protest to mark five years of weekly demonstrations against the separation barrier in the West Bank village of Bilin.
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and Geneva Mayor Remy Pagani were among the estimated 2,000 participants at the demonstration in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
As they do every week, villagers and international activists marched to the wire fence where the Israeli forces are positioned, chanting slogans and waving Palestinian flags.
And as often happens, a smaller group of Palestinian teenagers used slingshots and hurled stones at the security forces, which responded with teargas and water cannons.
Palestinians say the separation barrier aims at grabbing their land and undermining the viability of their promised state.
The protesters say they have won a partial victory as Israel last week began implementing a September 2007 High Court ruling ordering the barrier to be rerouted, returning some of the 575 acres (232 hectares) of Bilins land that was seized to build a fence around the Jewish settlement of Modin Illit.
While the rerouting is viewed as a victory, demonstrators vowed protests will continue until the occupation is over and the wall is dismantled in its entirety, organisers said in a statement.
The barrier - a network of concrete walls, fences and barbed wire - snakes through the West Bank, territory occupied by Israel in 1967 on which the Palestinians hope to build their state.
To date, Israel has completed 413km of the planned 709-kilometre barrier, according to UN figures.
When completed, 85pc of the wall will have been built inside the West Bank, leaving 9.5pc of the territory and 35,000 Palestinians between the barrier and the Green Line that marks the 1967 border with Israel.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a non-binding resolution in 2004 calling for those parts of the barrier that are inside the West Bank to be torn down and for further construction in the territory to cease.