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US Secretary of State John Kerry is all set to travel to Rome this Sunday to speak with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“They will discuss a number of issues, including recent developments in Israel, the West Bank, and Jerusalem and the region”, US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.
Kerry had been dogged in his nine-month pursuit for peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis before the negotiations collapsed in April. On Sunday, Kerry, while vowing that he “won’t give up”, acknowledged that after Netanyahu called for elections in March, it is unlikely that negotiations would “resume tomorrow”.
“There is an election in the next few months now in Israel, and the Israeli people will have important choices to make for their future. We look forward to working closely with the new government, whatever its composition, whenever it is formed. (We) will absolutely not involve ourselves in any way in the middle of the choice of the people of Israel”, Kerry said at the Saban Forum.
However, he insisted that the current status quo was not sustainable, adding that the “ongoing unrest had brought new traumas to everybody”.
“Common sense and strategic analysis tells us definitively: this cannot go on”, he said.
News of the trip comes amid tension in the region as a Palestinian official died on Wednesday after being struck by blows from Israeli security forces in the West Bank.
At the forum on Sunday, Netanyahu said that the peace talks had collapsed because of the Palestinians.
“(The) talks ended because the Palestinians wanted them to end” he said, before adding that the Palestinian leadership “is simply not prepared… to confront violence and fanaticism within Palestinian society”. He also recently sacked Israeli justice minister Tzipi Livni, the chief Israeli negotiator during the talks
