John Kerry Says Mideast Peace Talks in ‘Holding Pattern’
Image by getty images
The United States said on Friday the Israeli-Palestinian peace process had come to a standstill, all but acknowledging U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will fail to meet his goal of a peace deal by April 29.
Israel on Thursday suspended the talks in response to a reconciliation pact between Fatah, the Palestinian faction that leads the West Bank, and Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and which the United States and Israel regard as a terrorist group.
The talks appeared to have been going nowhere for months.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki sought to place the onus on the Israelis and the Palestinians to decide whether they can find a way to continue the negotiations, which Kerry had championed and to which he devoted extensive time and travel.
“We are in a holding period where parties need to figure out what is next,” Psaki said. “We have always thought there could be a point where we needed to pause and both sides needed to look at what was possible. And we’re clearly at that point now.”
“He certainly may stay in touch with them as may our negotiating team,” Psaki told reporters, saying Kerry had spoken separately to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday.
“But in terms of what needs to happen now, yes, absolutely, we’re at a point where the parties need to figure out what’s next. We’ll still remain in touch with them, but it is on them,” she said at her daily briefing.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
