Rice presses Barak on roadblocks

04/05/2008| IslamWeb

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, has met Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, to discuss the removal of roadblocks dotting the Palestinian territory of the West Bank.

Sunday's meeting came a day after Rice held talks with Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, and urged him not to undermine Palestinian security forces.

 

Later on Sunday, Rice appeared at a joint news conference with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, in Ramallah, and described Jewish settlements in the West Bank as "particularly problematic" to efforts to establish a Palestinian state.

   

Rice said she was pressing Israel to do more to ease restrictions on Palestinian movement but also stressed that Palestinians needed to take further action to meet Israeli security demands.

She said the year-end goal for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is still "achievable", but urged Israel not to prejudice a final agreement.

Rice's visit comes shortly after members of the Middle East Quartet called on Israel to freeze the construction of further illegal settlements in the West Bank.

The Quartet, which includes the UN, the US, Russia and the European Union, said in a statement on Friday that all Israeli outposts erected after March 2001 should be dismantled.

Roadblock review

Palestinians say that Israel has removed only small barriers or partially dismantled obstacles despite pledging to pull them down.

Rice said she will question the "qualitative character'" of some of the roadblocks Israel has already removed.

Not all roadblocks are created equal," she said.

"The first thing we are going to do is to review the ones that were supposedly moved."

"We don't want to get into a numbers game where you just remove 'X' number of roadblocks but it's not improving the lives of the Palestinians."

Since 2000 Israel has set up a network of hundreds of checkpoints, gates and barriers in the occupied West Bank.

After Rice's last trip in late March, Israel said it planned to remove 61 barriers but a UN survey subsequently found that only 44 obstacles had been scrapped and that most were of little or no significance.

Little progress

Yossi Mekelberg, a Middle East expert, told Al Jazeera that there is little progress in peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.

"Everyone agrees that there is no progress, they don't deal with the real issues, and there is not enough momentum. I can't see there is going to be any progress in the near future.

"The question is [are they] behind the scenes working on issues like Jerusalem and refugees.

"The United states is the one that has to take the lead. There is a feeling among the Palestinians that the Unites States is not playing an honest broker any more."

PHOTO CAPTION:

Rice discussed with Barak the removal of roadblocks.

Al-Jazeera