Reuters/Ramallah


Palestinian stone-throwers help a wounded man after he was shot and wounded by Israeli soldiers during clashes in Iraq Burin village near the West Bank city of Nablus yesterday. Seven Palestinian were wounded during the clashes, hospital sources said
Palestinians will seek recognition as a UN member-state in September given the deadlock in US-brokered peacemaking with Israel, a senior Palestinian official said yesterday.
Nabil Shaath urged President Barack Obama, who on Thursday criticised the planned move at the UN general assembly, to join countries that have already endorsed a Palestinian state taking in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Another Palestinian official, Nabil Abu Rudeina, said the drive to win statehood status unilaterally could be forestalled should Israel accept the demand to extend a freeze on its settlement on occupied land so that negotiations can resume.
But such rapprochement looked highly unlikely after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, hosted in Washington on Friday, sparred with Obama over a new US call for the future Palestinian state to have a border approximating to the West Bank’s boundary before Israel captured it in the 1967 war.
“Of course we will go to the UN,” Shaath, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said.
“Especially after Netanyahu used the old pretext that he needs ‘defensible borders’ to keep stealing our land, control the Jordan Valley and create demographic facts on the ground.”
Diplomats see majority support for the Palestinians in the UN General Assembly. But the statehood vote would have first to be approved in the Security Council, where the US - which insists on a negotiated peace accord - has a veto.
“We urge President Obama to recognise the Palestinian state on the 1967 borders,” Shaath said. “We are going to the UN in September, using all non-violent means.”
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, who had earlier warned his compatriots that a pro-Palestinian “diplomatic tsunami” was about to crest, welcomed Obama’s remarks about the UN lobbying.
“The president has erased the September issue. It’s very important,” Barak told Israel’s Channel Two television.
In February, the US struck down a Security Council motion that would have branded the West Bank settlements as illegal. Analysts, noting that the 14 other council members voted in favour, said the Palestinians appeared to be signalling that Washington was out of step with an international consensus.
Delivering a major Middle East policy speech on Thursday, Obama cautioned Palestinians against “efforts to delegitimise Israel”. He added: “Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the UN in September won’t create an independent state.”
Obama questioned the viability of a power-share deal forged last month between Abbas’s Fatah faction and the armed, rival Hamas Islamists who control Gaza and spurn the Jewish state.
But the Palestinians, who have long complained of Israeli unilateralism, were buoyed by Obama’s vision of borders “based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps”.