RAMALLAH – The European Union (EU) is willing to monitor Israel's commitment in freezing settlement activities once peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians are resumed, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyadh al-Maliki said on Wednesday. Maliki's remarks came a day after his meeting in Ramallah with Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency. "The EU is ready to send various teams to the occupied West Bank and ocuppied East Jerusalem to examine the Israeli commitment to ceasing settlement constructions," al-Maliki told Voice of Palestine radio. Al-Maliki also welcomed the EU's intention "to play a supportive role" when the negotiations restart. The 27-member bloc is a member of the Middle East peace Quartet which also includes the United States, Russia and the United Nations. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said he wanted Israel to freeze the settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territories before resuming the long-stalled peace talks. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said after a meeting with Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos in Ramallah that the Palestinian Authority was still studying the proposal of US Mideast Envoy George Mitchell for peace process in the Middle East, however it didn't take any final decision in this regard yet. On the other hand Moratinos said that he would not spare an effort in order to lead peace process in the right direction and pointed that he was exerting all the efforts and possibilities in order to remove hindrances impeding resuming peace negotiations the most important of which halting Israeli colonial activities. Meanwhile, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad attended a rare joint discussion about the peace process at the Herzliya Conference at the Interdisciplinary Centre. Fayyad stressed in his address that "the state being built here is Palestinian, and who should build it rather than us? A peace process is needed, because this will lead to the end of the occupation. "We want to be ready for a state which is about to be established, and we are ready to establish it by 2011. We are encouraged because we have made progress in creating an infrastructure in the past two years." In Gaza, a senior official from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party arrived in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, the first such visit by a high-ranking member of party since Hamas seized control of the salient in June 2007. Nabil Shaath, a former Palestinian Foreign Minister, told reporters as he crossed into the enclave that he had come to hold talks with senior Hamas officials, and representatives of other Palestinian factions in the Strip. He will stay two days in the salient and his talks will focus on ending the current division between Hamas and Fatah, sparked by the week of bloody gun battles in June 2007, when Hamas gunmen routed security forces loyal to Abbas and the Palestinian Authority.
