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US ready to publish peace plan

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The Trump administration is reportedly close to finalising and presenting its plan for restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

According to three US sources in the New York Times, US President Donald Trump’s Middle East team is most concerned about how to present the plan without it being immediately rejected by the parties involved. The Palestinian leadership has said that the US can no longer act as an honest broker in any peace talks since it announced late last year that it recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and would relocate its embassy there.

According to the newspaper, unlike previous proposals, the plan will not call for a two-state solution as one of its goals, though it will prescribe pathways for the creation of two states, including solutions to all the key disputes: borders, security, refugees and the status of Jerusalem. Nor will it call for a “fair and just solution” for Palestinian refugees, though it will offer steps to deal with the issue of refugees.

“The Israelis and the Palestinians would each find things in the plan to embrace and oppose,” the New York Times report said.

A US official compared the plans to the navigation app Waze, that helps drivers bypass traffic jams. The plan is meant to help Israelis and Palestinians get around traps and bottlenecks to an agreement. Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his Cabinet ministers that “there is no concrete US peace plan on the table at the moment. I am not saying there couldn’t be one in the future, but right now there is none.”

Senior Palestinian officials have claimed that some Arab countries have been pressuring Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas to accept the US peace plan when it is presented. Abbas has warned his own colleagues that “any member of the Palestinian leadership who does so will be held accountable for causing harm to the Palestinian and Arab national security”. He also expressed “appreciation” for Arab countries’ support his approach including a “multilateral international mechanism” that would dilute US influence.