JERUSALEM -- Wrapping up a Mideast visit aimed at advancing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday criticized Israel's continued building in West Bank settlements after plans were announced for new housing construction.
The Jerusalem municipality said it had approved plans for building 600 new homes in Pisgat Zeev, a neighborhood built on West Bank land annexed to the city after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The ultra-Orthodox Shas party said that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had promised to build 800 more homes in Beitar Illit, a town of Orthodox Jews near Jerusalem that is one of the fastest-growing settlements in the West Bank.
"We continue to state America's position that settlement activity should stop, that its expansion should stop -- that it is indeed not consistent with road-map obligations," Rice said at news conference after talks in Amman, Jordan, with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Abbas, Olmert to meet
Despite the Israeli expansion plans, Abbas said he would meet with Olmert next week, resuming periodic sessions that were interrupted a month ago after a deadly Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip in response to stepped-up rocket attacks.
The U.S.-backed peace plan known as the road map, the basis of the renewed negotiations, requires Israel to freeze all settlement activity and the Palestinians to break up and disarm militant groups.
Disputes over continued Israeli settlement construction hampered early rounds of the talks, which were relaunched at a U.S.-hosted conference last November in Annapolis, Md.
Rice, who met Monday with the Israeli and Palestinian chief negotiators -- Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Ahmed Qureia -- said that the peace talks were "moving in the right direction." She expressed confidence that an agreement could be reached before President Bush leaves office in January 2009.
