Israel considering revoking Oslo Accords in response to UN bid

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Report:Published yesterday (updated) 25/07/2011 14:01 TEL AVIV, Israel (Ma’an)

Israel is considering revoking the Oslo Accords in response to Palestinians’ bid for membership of the United Nations in September, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported Monday.

Israeli officials told Haaretz that a team led by National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidror was considering voiding the Oslo Accords as one of several options that would be presented to the political echelon.

Under the 1995 Oslo agreement, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators outlined a plan for Palestinian autonomy allowing the Palestinian Authority administrative and security control of around 17.2 percent of the West Bank, Area A. The rest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip remained under Israeli military occupation.

The interim deal was intended to lead to a final status agreement by 1999, but a permanent solution was never reached and frequent incursions by the Israeli army into Area A have undermined the agreement.

Haaretz reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office confirmed the National Security Council was discussing many alternatives in response to the UN campaign, which Israel considers a unilateral move.

At a diplomatic meeting in Istanbul on Saturday, President Mahmoud Abbas said Israel had forced Palestinians to take their statehood campaign to the UN by refusing to end its occupation and settlement building.

The president said Palestinians wished to join the UN “like the rest of the peoples of the world,” recalling that Palestinians had been living under Israeli occupation since 1967.

A senior Palestinian official told AFP that an official letter would be sent to the UN during the first week of August.

Abbas said Palestinians would prefer to return to negotiations but that continued settlement building and occupation left no choice but to approach the UN.

“We are going to the United Nations because we are forced to, it is not a unilateral action,” he said at a gathering attended by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“What is unilateral is Israeli settlement,” Abbas said at the meeting organized to finalize Palestinian strategy ahead of the UN General Assembly in September.

“We have not been able to return to negotiations with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu because of his refusal to negotiate on the basis of the 1967 borders and to stop settlement.”

“Our first, second and third choice is to return to negotiations,” Abbas said.

The last round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations collapsed in September shortly after Washington relaunched the first direct talks for nearly two years.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to extend a partial freeze on illegal Jewish-only settlement construction on occupied Palestinian land, despite generous incentives from US President Barack Obama to continue the building moratorium.

The Palestinians withdrew from the talks, saying they could not negotiate with Israel while it built Jewish-only housing on land which would be a Palestinian state under a peace agreement.

AFP contributed to this report