JERUSALEM: Israel named 26 Palestinians yesterday it will free from jail this week under a deal enabling US-backed peace talks to resume.
But the goodwill gesture was clouded by new plans to expand Israeli settlements that the United Nations and European Union condemned as illegal and which the Palestinians said were aimed at provoking them to pull out of the negotiations.
The 26 prisoners are the first of a total of 104 that Israel has decided in principle to free as part of an agreement reached after shuttle diplomacy by US Secretary of State John Kerry to renew talks for Palestinian statehood.
Some Israelis reacted angrily to the release — scheduled for today or tomorrow — of the long-term Palestinian prisoners.
“Shame on the government and shame on the prime minister and his supporters,” Zvia Dahan, whose father, Moshe Becker, was killed while tending his orange grove in Israel in 1994, wrote on Facebook. One of Becker’s three killers is to be freed.
Israel sweetened the deal for far-right members of its governing coalition on Sunday by announcing plans to build 1,187 new dwellings for Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and parts of the territory it annexed to Jerusalem after the 1967 Middle East war. Israel’s Channel 10 television said another 900 units were planned for the Beit Jallah area near Bethlehem. An official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in response that the project was not yet under construction.
“Those who do these things are determined to undermine the peace negotiations, are determined to force people like us to leave the negotiating table,” Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters.
A spokesman for European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said: “Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law and threaten to make a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict impossible.”
Eduardo del Buey, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said: “settlements in the occupied territories are illegal, they have been and continue to be illegal”. Mark Regev, a spokesman for Netanyahu, said the new construction would take place in areas that Israel intends to keep in any peace agreement.
REUTERS
