UN chief backs Palestinian state

11 Palestinians wounded in Israeli airstrikes

RAMALLAH, West Bank: UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Saturday said the international community “strongly supports” Palestinian efforts to build a viable state at the start of a visit aimed at reviving peace talks.

He kicked off his two-day visit by meeting Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad in the West Bank political capital of Ramallah and praising his plan to build the institutions of an independent Palestinian state by mid-2011.

Ban is also expected to meet senior Israeli officials and to visit the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, still largely in ruins following a 22-day Israeli military campaign launched in December 2008.

Ban arrived in Ramallah a day after the Middle East diplomatic Quartet called for Israel to halt all settlement construction and for both sides to reach a peace deal by 2012.

“The Quartet has sent a clear and strong message: we are strongly supporting your efforts to establish an independent and viable Palestinian state,” he told Fayyad ahead of the formal talks.

At a joint press conference after the meeting Ban called on both sides to revive talks suspended after the start of the Gaza war, saying “we have to get negotiations under way.”

The Palestinians grudgingly agreed to US-led indirect talks earlier this month but those efforts largely fell apart two days later when Israel announced plans to build 1,600 new settler homes in mostly Arab east Jerusalem.

Ban “condemned strongly” the decision to build the homes and warned that, “for the negotiations to succeed, it is vital that the parties act responsibly on the ground.

“All settlement activity is illegal anywhere in the occupied territories, and this must stop,” he said.

Fayyad had earlier taken Ban to a vantage point outside Ramallah to show him a large swathe of West Bank territory known as Area C which is under exclusive Israeli control and off limits to Palestinian development.

From the observation point Ban could see Israel’s controversial separation fence, a Jewish settlement and the skyline of Jerusalem, where the Palestinians hope to locate their future capital.

“The visit to Area C was an opportunity for the secretary general to see the difficulties that we face on a daily basis in our efforts to develop and build in preparation for our state,” Fayyad said at the press conference.

As part of his state-building plan, Fayyad has vowed to establish “positive facts on the ground” in Area C, which he said makes up some 60 percent of the occupied West Bank.

Meanwhile, the Israeli F-16 jets dropped several bombs at Rafah airport, wounding over 10 people who were collecting gravel from the destroyed runways, witnesses said.

A doctor at Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital in Rafah, speaking on condition of anonymity, said at least 11 injuries were brought to the hospital, noting that more wounded are expected to report to the hospital since ambulances still trying to access the area.

Israel has hit the only airport in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the second Intifada in 2000. Recently, Hamas, which controls Gaza, makes use of the materials of the airport runways to pave roads in other places in the coastal enclave.

Tension in Gaza started Thursday when militants fired a rocket and killed a Thai worker in an Israeli farm in the coastal city of Ashkelon.

On Thursday night, the airplanes had struck at a workshop in Gaza city and there were no injuries reported. - AFP/Xinhuanet