U.S.-led proposals on security, presented by Secretary of State John Kerry, will result in the "total failure" of the peace talks with Israel, a senior Palestinian official said on Monday.
Speaking to Agence France Presse, Palestine Liberation Organisation official Yasser Abed Rabbo said: "These ideas will drive Kerry’s efforts to an impasse and to total failure because he is treating our issues with a high degree of indifference,” referencing Kerry's proposals on future security deals in the Jordan Valley.
Rabbo made his comments just days after Kerry ended his latest visit to the Middle East, in a trip that focused solely on Israel's security needs in any future peace deal, AFP reported.
Security proposals made to the Israelis by Kerry and his security adviser General John Allen were reportedly well recieved, but were "coldly dismissed" by the Palestinians, AFP said, who slammed them as “very bad ideas which we cannot accept.”
Critics said that the U.S.' proposals would give Israel the ability to maintain a military presence in the Jordan Valley, which runs to the east of the West Bank, in a move that was rejected outright by the Palestinians, who argued that "it would make a mockery of their sovereignty and merely perpetuate the occupation," AFP reported.
“[Kerry] only wants to win over the Israelis and (allow) settlement expansion at our expense,” Abed Rabbo charged, according to AFP.
