The Times of Israel reported yesterday that the Palestinian Authority is furious with Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent diplomatic maneuverings.
Palestinian sources told the London-based A-Sharq Al-Awsat that Kerry had initially agreed to an Egyptian proposal for an immediate ceasefire followed by five days of negotiations between Israel and the PA, with American assurances to address some of Hamas’s demands. But on Friday evening Kerry produced a new plan based on consultations with Qatar and Turkey and conducted between “the State of Israel” and “the Palestinian factions,” excluding the PA. The Israeli cabinet unanimously rejected Kerry’s plan.
“Kerry tried, through his latest plan, to destroy the Egyptian bid and the Palestinian remarks on it (the Abbas plan). His initiative is an alternative to ours,” an unnamed Palestinian official told A-Sharq Al-Awsat. “Kerry was in fact trying to create an alternative framework to the Egyptian initiative and our understanding of it, in a way that placates the Qataris and the Turks.”
The Palestinians claimed that before Kerry adopted the Qatar-Turkey language, they “were ‘very close’ to finalizing a ceasefire deal.”
Israeli sources, including a number of Israeli journalists, blasted Kerry’s diplomatic initiatives. According to David Horovitz, editor of The Times of Israel, Kerry’s proposal “‘tunneled under the Egyptian initiative,’ a document, to quote from another of those leaked comments, that reads like it was drawn up for or even by Hamas’s Khaled Mashaal.”
Jonathan Schanzer and David Weinberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies warned that allowing Qatar and Turkey, both sponsors of Hamas, to influence the ceasefire agreement would “reward them for bad behavior.”
[Photo: U.S. Department of State / WikiCommons ]