Abbas: Palestine to walk away from deadlocked peace talks

Mahmoud Abbas said he would discuss the situation with the Arab League EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said on Thursday the Palestinians' announcement that they were ending informal talks with Israel does not mean the two sides have reached an "impasse." "I do not think there is an impasse. I know that president (Mahmud) Abbas is thinking carefully about how to move forward. For him the meeting of the Arab (League) Follow Up Committee in Cairo is extremely important," Ashton told reporters after meeting Abbas in Amman.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said earlier Thursday his side would walk away from deadlocked exploratory peace talks with Israel and weigh its next moves.
"If we demarcate the borders, we can return to negotiations, but the Israelis do not want demarcation of borders," Palestine news agency WAFA quoted Abbas as saying.
The Palestinian National Authority says it wants Israel to accept, as a basis for negotiations, Israel's borders before the 1967 Six-Day War that led to Israel's West Bank and Gaza occupation. It also wants Israel to halt Jewish settlement construction -- deemed illegal under international law -- in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
US President Barack Obama called last May for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the creation of a non-militarised Palestinian state based on Israel's prewar borders, modified by land swaps -- a proposal Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu immediately rejected, calling the borders "indefensible'' and counter to earlier US commitments.
Netanyahu urged Palestinian negotiators to return to the talks without preconditions, rejecting the Palestinian demand to halt settlement building.
"They would be making a mistake if they are looking for excuses to leave the table," an Israeli official quoted by the British newspaper The Independent said. "Walking away ... is not going to solve anything."
Israeli and Palestinian representatives met five times this month in Amman as part of a Jordanian effort to advance a plan by international mediators to resume formal peace talks.
The plan, presented in September by the Quartet -- the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia -- set a Thursday deadline for both sides to present proposals on borders and security.
Israel said the Palestinian-approved deadline was "artificial" to create an "artificial crisis," The Independent said.
"Israel chose to [promote] settlements over peace," a Palestinian official quoted by The Independent said.
After meeting with Jordanian King Abdullah in Amman, Abbas said Wednesday a decision on the next steps would be made at an Arab League foreign ministers meeting February 4.
Options the authority may consider include reviving its UN statehood bid and asking the International Criminal Court to investigate alleged war crimes during the Israeli invasion of the Palestinian-controlled Gaza strip in 2008, The Independent said.
The last top-level talks took place in Washington in September 2010 but collapsed within weeks when Israel's partial moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank expired.