Hamas: Middle-East peace talks doomed to failure

A senior member of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, underlined that Washington’s efforts to restore peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians are doomed to failure. “The peace talks will bear no result other than failure or giving birth to an illegitimate child to be rejected by the Palestinian nation,” Hamas political bureau member Ezzat al-Rashq said on Sunday.     Al-Rashq underlined that failure will be the definite outcome of any scenario staged in the absence of national consensus. Earlier this year, US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that he finally “convinced Israeli and Palestinian officials to return to the negotiating table.” This is while the prospects for peace appear just as unlikely as before. In May, Head of the Political Bureau of the Palestinian Hamas movement Khalid Mashaal had underlined that Washington's efforts to restore peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians are doomed to fail since the US secretary of state has not presented any solution to the ongoing crisis. “The US secretary of state has not presented any solution to settle the conflicts between the Palestinians and the Zionist regime and therefore the country’s efforts are doomed to fail similar to the past,” Mashaal said. He complained that John Kerry has not adopted a serious approach to settle the Palestinian issue fairly because it has never pressured Israel as the occupier, and has just pressured the Arab sides and the Palestinian authority and presented some useless projects. The US secretary of state has claimed to be seeking to revive direct peace talks that broke down in 2010 over the issue of Jewish settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. He hailed the Arab League's revised Middle-East peace initiative as "a very big step forward". But Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh at the time rejected the plan, saying outsiders could not decide the fate of the Palestinians. In the meetings held in early May in Washington, Arab states appeared to soften their 2002 peace plan, acknowledging that Israelis and Palestinians may have to swap land in any eventual peace deal. Addressing hundreds of worshippers in a Gaza mosque, Haniyeh said it was a concession that other Arabs were not authorized to make. “The so-called new Arab initiative is rejected by our people, by our nation and no one can accept it,” Haniyeh said.