The Palestinian authorities are ready to continue peace talks with Israel, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said on Sunday.
“We’ll continue the dialog and we’ll continue the (peace) talks because we consider this to be the only way (to resolve the problem) but if they fail, this will happen through Israel’s fault,” Abbas said after his talks with Russia’s chief Mufti Ravil Gainutdin in Moscow.
Abbas arrived in Moscow for a six-day working visit on Thursday. On Friday, he discussed Middle East settlement issues with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Palestine is supporting the negotiating process as the only way to achieve peaceful settlement but considers Israel as the country responsible for the remaining problems between the two sides, Abbas said.
“Recently, Israeli settlers burnt down five mosques in West Bank,” Abbas said, adding that attacks continued from Israeli settlements on Palestinians.
The Palestine-Israeli talks stalled in September 2010 over disagreements on Israeli settlements’ construction in the West Bank. Palestinians said they would not resume negotiations unless the construction stopped.
The Palestinians are seeking to create an independent state on the territories of West Bank, East Jerusalem, partially occupied by Israel, and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and want Israel to pull from the Palestinian territories occupied after the 1967 war.
Israel, however, has refused to return to the 1967 borders and is unwilling to raise the issue of Jerusalem, which it says is the indivisible capital of the Jewish state.
