Hamas calls on PA to cancel Israel talks

Resistance movement of Hamas has called on the Palestinian Authority to boycott an upcoming meeting with the Israeli negotiators in Jordan's capital Amman. “We urge the Palestinian Authority to cancel the meeting. These meetings are a repetition of a track that had failed over the past years,” Hamas spokesman in Gaza Sami Abu Zuhri said on Monday. On Sunday, the Jordanian Foreign Ministry announced that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators will meet in Jordan on Tuesday for direct talks, the first such negotiations between the two sides in more than a year. Earlier on Monday in the West Bank, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that he believed his meeting with Israel's envoy Yitzhak Molcho on Tuesday will only bear fruit if Israel agrees to halt its illegal settlement constructions in the West Bank and east Al-Quds (east Jerusalem). He also said Israel must accept its 1967 borderlines as the basis for a future border. In September 2010, direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks broke off after Israel refused to extend a limited and partial 10-month freeze on illegal settlement constructions in the West Bank.