Gaza PM rejects new Arab peace plan

Prime Minister of the Palestinian Government in Gaza Strip Ismail Haniyeh vehemently rejected the peace plan, raised recently by an Arab League delegation in Washington and envisaging land swap between Palestine and Israel. "The Palestinian people are totally opposed to the peace plan since Palestine is not a real estate to be sold or bought," he said here on Thursday evening during meeting with foreign envoys visiting Gaza. The new proposal entails a new concession by the Arab side which could only encourage the Israeli occupation authorities to scale up the Jewish settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories, he warned. "The leadership of Ramallah (the Palestinian Government in the West Bank) was the first advocate of the principle of territory swap or bargaining over the pre-June, 1967, borderlines (between Palestine and Israel)," said Haniyeh who is also Deputy Chairman of Hamas Politburo. He was commenting on the remarks, made by Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassem Al Thani after the talks on Monday between the Arab delegation, on one hand, and US Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry, on the other. Sheikh Hamad indicated that the League is flexible about the pre-1967 borderlines and could accept a slight modification to the Arab Peace Initiative (API) first raised in 2002. He voiced hope that the important meetings of the Arab delegation in Washington would pave the way for re-launching the long-stalled Palestinian-Israeli peace talks and making comprehensive peace in the region. Besides Sheikh Hamad, the Arab delegation included foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Government in the West Bank as well as the League's Secretary-General Dr. Nabil Al-Arabi.