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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed the Palestinians for the apparent stalemate in their peace talks, accusing them of creating "artificial crises" and incitement. He spoke after talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry, who is attempting to revive the peace process. The direct negotiations launched in July have shown little sign of progress and are due to end next April. Mr Kerry will later meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The secretary of state has denied media speculation that he may propose a new interim peace deal. Kerry confident Mr Netanyahu said Israel stood by the terms...

The Israeli government has approved the release of another 26 Palestinian prisoners as part of a US-brokered deal for the resumption of peace talks. They will be the second round of prisoners to be freed since August. A statement from the Israeli prime minister's office said the inmates had all been jailed for violence committed before the 1993 Oslo accords. Israeli and Palestinian representatives began direct talks in Jerusalem in August after a three-year hiatus. As part of the process, Israel has agreed to release 104 long-serving Palestinian prisoners. Behind bars The names of the latest group of detainees set...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to meet Pope Francis and US Secretary of State John Kerry in Italy next week. Netanyahu will meet Francis in the Vatican Wednesday, ahead of the pontiff’s expected visit to Israel next year. In Rome, the prime minister will meet with Kerry to discuss the current nuclear negotiations between six world powers on Iran, and the peace process with the Palestinians, according to a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office. The first round of renewed nuclear negotiations between the so-called P5+1 powers and the Islamic Republic concluded Wednesday with cautious optimism from both sides....

The Palestinians might turn to U.N. bodies in response to Israeli settlement building even before their negotiations with Israel have run their course, a Palestinian spokeswoman said Wednesday, reflecting growing frustration over recent Israeli plans to promote more than 3,000 new settlement homes. If the U.S. is unable to halt Israeli construction on war-won lands, deemed illegal by most of the international community, the Palestinians may have to seek redress elsewhere, said Hanan Ashrawi, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organization. "We are saying very clearly that if Israel does not stop, then we have to move," Ashrawi said...

JERUSALEM (CNS) — Coveted as a spiritual and political capital by both Israelis and Palestinians, the status of the city of Jerusalem has stood out as one of the pivotal topics in their ongoing peace negotiations. snip “Jerusalem is very critical to the negotiations,” said Bernard Sabella, associate professor of sociology at Bethlehem University and a member of the Palestinian parliament. “U.N. resolutions and even the United States recognize East Jerusalem as occupied territory. We are going to have to find a solution set-up which is acceptable to both parties. snip Rabbi Rosen said that although there are some fringe...

Once upon a time I was kindly asked to leave my Jewish high school. It seems that 15 year olds who wear kefiyehs on the anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre and question the legitimacy of Israel’s settlement policy pose an insurmountable obstacle to a parochial educational system based on ideological conformity. Years after my unceremonious expulsion, I attended a university whose student handbook calendar marked May 15th as “Naqba Day”. When Bibi came to speak on campus, riots erupted. My qualms about Israel’s policies towards its Abrahamic cousins were overshadowed by the desperate need to defend Israel’s right...

In what is being described as yet another example of Palestinian Authority (PA) denial of the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the very legitimacy of the State of Israel, the Presidential Guard of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has claimed the Western Wall as an Arab and Islamic site. Last week, a picture of the Western Wall was posted onto the PA Presidential Guard's official Facebook page with a PA flag superimposed on it, along with the words "The Al Buraq Wall - Public Relations and Information - The Presidential Guard - Palestinian youth know their rights." The Western Wall...

Full title: "True believers: Bibi, Barry, Kerry, and the inevitable destruction resulting from fanaticism wound with fantasy" Standing next to US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday morning, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni gushed that through his indefatigable efforts to bring Israeli and Palestinian officials to Washington, Kerry proved that "nothing can stop true believers." As usual, the cognitively-challenged Livni told us something she hadn't intended to say. The term "true believer" was coined by Eric Hoffer in his classic work The True Believer from 1951, which Livni has obviously not read. Hoffer's epic study of the psychological roots of...

Israelis and Palestinians are sparring over the very premise for their peace negotiations as envoys from each side head into talks in Washington that have been trumpeted as the revival of diplomacy after three years of stalemate. While the US remains mum on the negotiating terms, the two parties are sparring over the central question of whether the talks are based on Israel's 1967 borders or not. The argument comes amid widespread skepticism on both sides that the US-brokered diplomacy will lead to a breakthrough to end more than a century of conflict. "They have zero chances of reaching an...

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced on Friday the resumption of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. "I'm pleased to announce that we've reached an agreement that establishes a basis for resuming final status negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis," Kerry told reporters in Amman, Jordan, according to AFP. "This is a significant and welcome step forward,” he added. “The agreement is still in the process of being finalized so we are absolutely not going to talk about any of the elements now." The top U.S. diplomat added that PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and Israeli...

WASHINGTON: The United States will begin formal talks with the Taliban, including the Haqqani network, in Doha, Qatar, in a couple of days, Obama administration officials said in a major announcement on Tuesday. The engagement, the first of its kind since the post 9/11 conflict, follows key concessions made by Washington, including dropping the pre-condition that Taliban immediately break ties with al-Qaida, in return for much broader, generic, self-serving commitments by the unyielding terrorist group. In a conference call from Northern Ireland where President Obama is attending the G8 summit, US officials said they expected Taliban to issue a statement...

Many more Americans continue to side with Israel rather than the Palestinian Authority, but - with President Obama's first visit there days away - most also prefer to leave peace negotiations to the two protagonists, rather than having the United States take the lead. Fifty-five percent in this ABC News/Washington Post poll sympathize more with Israel, vs. 9 percent who side more with the Palestinian Authority, with the rest favoring neither, or undecided. It's been a similar gap for many years, including polling back to the 1980s testing Israel vs. the Arab nations of the Middle East. See PDF with...

When President Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced Jan. 11 that a negotiating office for the Taliban was about to open in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, optimism soared within the administration that peace talks would soon be back on track. But January’s optimism has become February’s reality check: There is still no agreement to open the office, and Karzai, back in Kabul after his Washington visit, says there will be no deal until Qatar meets his conditions in writing. As the Obama administration nears a decision on the pace of U.S. combat troop withdrawals from Afghanistan between...

This column was co-authored by Bob MorrisonSen. John Kerry has a long and dubious record in foreign policy. In the 1970's, he testified against his fellow Vietnam War veterans before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He charged that they were violating the Geneva Conventions every day in Vietnam. Some POWs were outraged at Kerry's disloyal statements. They said they had been tortured by their Communist captors trying to force them to make such untrue statements. Worse, Kerry went to Paris in 1971. There, he met with North Vietnamese Communists. We need to see all his notes from those meetings....

Gaza truce agreed, Hamas says, to take effect in hours By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Jeffrey Heller | Reuters – 30 mins ago GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An Egyptian-brokered ceasefire in the Gaza conflict will go into effect later on Tuesday, a Hamas official said. There was no immediate Israeli comment. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier he was open to a long-term deal to halt Palestinian rocket attacks on his country. "An agreement for calm has been reached. It will be declared at 9 o'clock (1900 GMT) and go into effect at midnight (2200 GMT)," Hamas official Ayman Taha told Reuters...

U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged Tuesday that the United States may release several Afghan Taliban prisoners from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as an incentive to bring the Taliban to peace talks. Meanwhile, Afghan officials told The Associated Press that a plan to give Afghanistan a form of legal custody over the men if they are released satisfied their earlier objection to sending the prisoners to a third country. Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper told Congress Tuesday that no decision had been made on whether to trade the five Taliban prisoners, now held at Guantanamo Bay as part...

*snip* As part of the accelerating, high-stakes diplomacy, Reuters has learned, the United States is considering the transfer of an unspecified number of Taliban prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay military prison into Afghan government custody. It has asked representatives of the Taliban to match that confidence-building measure with some of their own. Those could include a denunciation of international terrorism and a public willingness to enter formal political talks with the government headed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The officials acknowledged that the Afghanistan diplomacy, which has reached a delicate stage in recent weeks, remains a long shot. Among the...

The Middle East is usually full of deception, duplicity, and backstabbing in its political both intra-country and inter-country. There is often a huge gap between actions and words. At times, it appears that nobody says what they mean and nobody means what they say. So, it comes as little surprise that the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations should go through an intermediary, the United States, and that there is deceit galore, at levels beyond anything I can remember. The Palestinian Authority in their dealings with the United States perpetrates the first deceit, and then there is the deceit in the approach and manipulation...

Between President Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, and Head Negotiators Yasser Abed Rabbo and Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian spokespeople have threatened every conceivable position regarding the moribund talks with Israel over the past couple of weeks. These threats include but are not limited to, unilaterally declaring an independent Palestinian State along the border of the Green Line, taking the entire negotiations to the United Nations for a final dispensation, dissolving the Palestinian Authority and throwing the whole of the West Bank back on Israel to maintain, and cutting all relations and cooperation with Israel declaring the Roadmap and Oslo...

The package Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has accepted for US-sponsored talks with the Palestinians contains more substantial concessions than merely a freeze on settlement construction and goes far beyond the one-year deal put before the security cabinet Saturday night, Nov. 13, debkafile reports from Jerusalem and Washington. The deal unveiled in Jerusalem early Sunday is only stage one of a larger secret package to which only Netanyahu and his close adviser Yithzak Molho are privy - not even Defense Minister Ehud Barak or the Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi.