Israel rejects Abbas terms for direct talks
Pressure mounts for ME talks

JERUSALEM, July 28 (AFP): International calls for direct Middle East peace talks mounted on Wednesday ahead of a key meeting of Arab ministers as the Palestinians stuck to their demands for guarantees on borders.

Arab foreign ministers were to meet in Cairo on Thursday to decide whether to endorse moving to face-to-face negotiations after nearly three months of US-mediated indirect talks that the Palestinians say have made no progress.

The ministers were expected to back Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, who has said he will only go to direct negotiations if he is given assurances they will succeed where past talks have collapsed into violence.

"We do not reject negotiations, but we want negotiations on a clear foundation that will lead to an independent Palestinian state," he told AFP earlier this week.

Specifically, he wants the 1967 borders separating Israel from the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem as the starting point of the negotiations and for Israel to freeze all settlement activity in both territories.

Israel annexed the Arab half of the city after capturing it in the 1967 Six Day War in a move not recognised internationally. The Palestinians view east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

Netanyahu has repeatedly said he is willing to meet with Abbas to discuss all the core issues of the decades-old conflict and accused the Palestinians of dodging direct talks.

On Wednesday the Israeli leader's deputy, Silvan Shalom, said Abbas was setting conditions that were "impossible" to accept.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at the weekend by telephone with Netanyahu as well as her counterparts from Jordan and Qatar, State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has laid down "impossible" conditions for moving to direct peace talks, Israel's vice prime minister charged on Wednesday.

"The Palestinians have set three impossible conditions: that the negotiations start from the point they left off at the end of 2008 when Ehud Olmert was prime minister, that they be based on a total Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines and that the freeze of (settlement) construction continue," Silvan Shalom told Israeli public radio.