France is ready to host a Middle East peace conference before the end of July to help relaunch stalled negotiations, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Thursday. Speaking in Ramallah, Juppe described the current stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians as "untenable," and said France was willing to transform a July meeting of international donors into a broader peace conference.
"We would be prepared, on the basis of a request by the (Mideast) Quartet, to organise in Paris..., before the end of July, a conference that would not be simply for the donors but a broader political conference involving the negotiation process," he said. Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, speaking to journalists alongside Juppe, welcomed the possibility of a peace conference.
"We were the ones who wanted the Paris conference to have a political dimension," he said. Juppe is holding meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials during a three-day trip, at a time that talks between the two sides are deadlocked over the issue of Jewish settlement construction.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.