Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PA President Mahmoud Abbas. Photo: Wiki Commons.

According to a report in the Jordanian press, Israel has agreed to a US-initiated three-way peace summit, while the Palestinian Authority is demanding preconditions, Israel’s Channel 10 reported on Sunday.

The government-owned newspaper Al Ra’i reported that the administration in Washington recently proposed the renewal of talks between Israel and the PA under its auspices. However, said the report – based on statements made by a PLO Executive Committee member – while Israel insisted that these be held with no preconditions, the PA said it would only consent if Israel first halted settlement construction and released another tranche of convicts.

“We welcome any activity whose goal is to move the political process forward, but there are conditions that Israel has to fulfill in order for the meeting not to deal solely with economic relations,” said Wassel Abu Yousef. “We are currently interested in progress along the lines of the French initiative.”

As was reported in The Algemeiner late in June, the foreign ministers of the European Union’s 28 member states backed the French initiative, adopted in Paris on June 3 — something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposed, on the grounds that only through direct negotiations with the Palestinians can any genuine progress be made.

The last round of negotiations between Israel and the PA began in the summer of 2013, following pressure by the US State Department to restart the peace process. These talks collapsed by April 2014.

In September 2015, amid rumors that Israel was attempting to change the status quo of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Palestinians launched a “lone-wolf intifada,” characterized mainly by stabbing and car-ramming attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians, which has continued until today, though it has waned considerably in the last two months, according to the IDF.