After uneventful meetings with the Palestinian and Israeli officials, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that progress of peace talks have stalled, but Washington is not giving up on a deal, Reuters reported.
The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Kerry on Wednesday morning and said the negotiations dealing with a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had not make progress, according to Reuters.
After meeting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem, Kerry said in "any negotiation there will be moments of up and moments of down, and it goes back and forth," adding "that despite the difficulties, both leaders, President Abbas and Prime Minister Netanyahu, are also determined to work towards this goal."
President Abbas said in a speech on Monday that after Kerry's rounds of negotiations "there is nothing on the ground," Reuters reported.
Netanyahu said he hoped Kerry's discussion in Jerusalem with the president "will help steer (the negotiations) back to a place where we could achieve the historical peace that we seek."
After a three-year break from peaceful ties and negotiations, Kerry helped bring back the land-for-peace talks between Israel and Palestine last July, Reuters reported. He's set a nine-month deadline for an agreement to be reached.
According to Reuters, meetings between Israel, Palestine and Kerry are being held at unannounced times and at undisclosed locations to keep information from being leaked to the public, but Palestinian officials are openly expressing their dismay with the current situation.
According to Palestinian officials, important issues like discussing the borders of the Palestinian state, and security arrangements, but two of the biggest issues are the Israeli settlements and fate of Palestinian refugees, Reuters reported.
An Israeli plan announced last week for 3,500 more settler homes in the occupied West Bank is now causing obstacles and tensions among the negotiating groups, according to Reuters.
The disagreement is over Israel's plan to build more homes for settlers in return for releasing Palestinian prisoners, with Israel citing historical and biblical links to the West Bank and East Jerusalem where 500,000 Israelis currently live alongside 2.5 million Palestinians, Reuters reported.
The Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not acknowledge by most countries and are considered illegal, according to Reuters. The territories, as well as the Hamas Islamist-run Gaza strip, were occupied and taken during the Middle East war in 1967.
Kerry managed to get Abbas to begin the peace talks again after the Palestinians stopped negotiations in 2010 due to the settlement building plans which they think will deny them their state, Reuters reported. Israel has already released half of the 104 prisoners as part of the agreement for Abbas to return to negotiations.
Palestinians have shown resentment and anger at Israel's agreeing to use the settlement campaign on land Palestinians have long sought for a state, in exchange for the Palestinian prisoners
With Kerry by his side, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu accused Palestinians of "creating an artificial crises" and added they are trying to "run away from the historic decisions that are needed to make a genuine peace," Reuters reported.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman in the Gaza Strip told Reuters that any deal reached by Abbas "would not be binding on our people."
