GAZA (AFP)
Former United States President Jimmy Carter, who brokered the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979, offered a "personal initiative" to open direct talks between Washington and Hamas during a recent visit to the region, a senior Hamas official said on Saturday.
"We received a written letter from President Carter that presented a personal initiative aimed at opening dialogue with the Hamas movement," Mushir al-Masri, a senior Hamas leader and parliamentarian, told AFP.
Masri, who attended a meeting between Carter and Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya in Gaza City last week, said the group would study the proposal though it would not accept the three conditions of the Mideast Quartet.
" We received a written letter from President Carter that presented a personal initiative aimed at opening dialogue with the Hamas movement " Mushir al Masri, Hamas The Quartet, made up of the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, has demanded that Hamas recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept past agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinians.
A source close to Hamas who spoke on condition of anonymity said Carter's initiative presented an alternative set of conditions -- that Hamas accept the vision of a two-state solution to the conflict embodied in the 2003 Roadmap agreement, and accept the 2002 Arab League peace initiative.
The latter initiative offers full recognition of Israel by every Arab state in return for the Jewish state's withdrawal from all lands occupied in the 1967 Six Day war, including the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
Carter told Hamas its acceptance of the two conditions would pave the way for the opening of direct talks with the U.S. administration, the source said. |
Carter tours the wreckage in the impoverished strip Carter insisted during his visit to the region that he had come as a private citizen and did not represent Washington, but the former president is a prominent member of U.S. President Barack Obama's Democratic party.
Israel and the West have always considered Hamas a terrorist organization because of its commitment to violent struggle and the eventual destruction of the Jewish state.
The Islamist group won a landslide victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and seized power in Gaza in June 2007 after a week of street battles with loyalists of the Western-backed president Mahmud Abbas. |
