Jerusalem/Ramallah - Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu asked ministers Wednesday to approve a 10-month freeze on Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, in a move designed to address an issue preventing the restart of peace talks with the Palestinians. The prime minister was slated to make a formal announcement on the freeze later Wednesday evening.
An official statement from Netanyahu's office spoke however, only of the suspension of new housing permits and starts, and made no mention of public buildings, nor of East Jerusalem, which Palestinians want as the capital of their future state.
There was also no reference to the 3,000 housing units whose construction has already been approved.
But even before the Israeli inner cabinet met in Jerusalem in the mid-afternoon, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad rejected the Israeli proposal.
Fayyad said that excluding East Jerusalem from any freeze would be a "major issue" for the Palestinians, and that a 10-month settlement construction halt would be "difficult", since "a moratorium is not a long-term freeze."
Palestinians have made a total Israeli construction freeze in West Bank settlements and in East Jerusalem a prerequisite for resuming peace talks, suspended one year ago when Israel began an election campaign.
Netanyahu initially rejected this demand - made also by US President Barak Obama - and said that while Israel will construct no new settlements, it will however build inside existing ones, to accommodate population expansion, so-called natural growth.
He also rejected any construction freeze in East Jerusalem.
Israeli and US officials have been trying for months to negotiate a solution to the imbroglio.
An Israeli government communique issued as the inner cabinet met said the freeze would include "a 10-month suspension of new residential construction permits and new residential construction starts" in the West Bank.
Netanyahu told the ministers that the "in the international circumstances that have been created," the freeze "has many more advantages than disadvantages."
"The government of Israel wants to enter into negotiations with the Palestinians, is taking practical steps in order to do so and is very serious in its intentions to promote peace," he said, according to the statement.
But Fayyad, speaking Wednesday morning to foreign correspondents in Ramallah, said the 2003 international road map peace plan, first released in 2003, called for a total halt to Israeli settlement expansion, and not for a 10-month moratorium.
He said Palestinians wanted peace talks to resume, but "not for the sake of it."
Our hope is to have the peace process resumed as soon as possible," he said. "If we are not moving and there is not a serious attempt, then that is not helpful for everyone."
"We want to see talks strong enough and capable enough to deliver the goods. Our aim is not self autonomy under occupation, but we are looking for what the road map described as an independent, viable Palestinian state," he said.
Right-wing Israeli politicians, including some from Netanyahu's cabinet, also rejected the freeze.
Scient Minister Daniel Hershkowitz, who head a small, three-seat nationalist party in the coalition, said a right-wing government should "not choke the settlements, but help them."
Danny Dayan, chairman of the West Bank Settlers Council, said that while Netanyahu was elected on a promise to develop and promote the settlements, he would ultimately eliminate all settlement activity.
Israel began settling the West Bank in 1967, soon after it captured the area from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War.
Religious and nationalist Jews regard the West Bank as part of the biblical Jewish homeland, and after the election of the nationalist right-wing Menahem Begin as prime minister in 1967, Israel began referring to the territory by its Biblical names of Judea and Samaria.
East Jerusalem, which was also captured from Jordan, was incorporated into (Israeli) West Jerusalem's municipal boundaries in 1967, and formally annexed in 1980.
More than 250,000 Israelis live in West Bank settlements. Israel hopes to retain the large settlements blocks, those near the old 1967 Israel-West Bank border, as part of any peace agreement with the Palestinians.
