Israel's deputy foreign minister today accused Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas of rejecting direct peace talks in favour of "unilateral" moves to seek statehood.
Abbas "is in no hurry to restart negotiations, despite the pressures on him, because he thinks that the unilateral path will get him further and that way he won't have to pay a political price," Zeev Elkin said on public radio.
Elkin's comments came just days before US Secretary of State John Kerry returns to the region for his fifth visit in just over four months in a bid to coax the parties into resuming direct talks which collapsed in September 2010.
His remarks were also made as Israel and the Palestinians separately marked 46 years since the start of the Six Day War when Israeli forces seized Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem, with the Palestinians mourning it as the "naksa" or setback.
The Palestinians in November successfully applied for upgraded UN status as a non-member state in a move sharply denounced by Israel and Washington as a "unilateral" move, with both insisting a Palestinian state can only arise out of bilateral negotiations.
Elkin, a hawkish member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rightwing Likud party, also reaffirmed Israel's refusal to return to the lines which existed before the 1967 Six Day War.
"The people of Israel are not ready to commit suicide and make the same mistake they made when they pulled out of the Gaza Strip (in 2005)," he said, referring to the subsequent takeover of the territory by Hamas and the barrage of rocket fire which has since been aimed at southern Israel.
A similar stance was expressed yesterday by Yoram Cohen, head of the Shin Bet domestic security agency, in a meeting with MPs at the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs and defence.
