A senior Palestinian Authority official rejected on Saturday an Israeli proposal to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with a temporary border. Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told the state-run Wafa news agency that "the choice of establishing a Palestinian state with negotiable temporary borders is totally rejected." He accused Israel of playing with an international peace plan the two parties accepted in 2002, adding: "Israel was juggling the Road Map by offering a Palestinian statehood with interim borders." "The choice of a statehood with temporary frontiers is completely rejected," Erekat said in a written statement. "This choice had appeared as an option in the second phase of the Road Map but had been deleted after we opposed it." On Thursday, Israeli President Shimon Peres said Israel could accept a neighboring Palestinian statehood with temporary borders until a specific time before finalizing the boundaries, according to a report of German news agency "DPA". Erekat said Peres' remarks were a return to the exchange of conditions instead of applying each party's commitments equivalently. The Quartet, including the US, the European Union, Russia and the UN, brokered the Road Map which calls on Israel and the Palestinians to take a series of steps ending with Palestinian statehood alongside Israel. But continuing Israeli settlement in the West Bank - the largest complicated part of the future Palestinian state - prevented years of peace negotiations from making any notable progress. The new US administration has intensified pressure on Israel to freeze all settlement activities in the West Bank.
