ISTANBUL (AFP) ? Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said Saturday that the Palestinians' bid for UN membership was forced upon them by Israel's refusal to halt settlement building and end its occupation.
"We are going to the United Nations because we are forced to, it is not a unilateral action," he said in a speech in Istanbul, where he is meeting Palestinian diplomats from around the world.
"What is unilateral is Israeli settlement," Abbas said as he convened the envoys to finalise Palestinian strategy ahead of the UN General Assembly in September.
"We have not been able to return to negotiations with (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu because of his refusal to negotiate on the basis of the 1967 borders and to stop settlement," he said at the meeting, attended by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been on hold since late September, shortly after Washington relaunched the first direct negotiations between the two sides for nearly two years.
The talks ground to a halt when Israel's partial freeze on settlement construction expired and Netanyahu declined to renew it. The Palestinians say they will not hold talks while Israel builds on land they want for a future state. Netanyahu blames the Palestinians for the deadlock.
"Our first, second and third choice is to return to negotiations," Abbas said on Saturday.
"Like the rest of the peoples of the world ... we wish to be members of the General Assembly, members of the UN; no more, no less," he said, recalling that the Palestinians had been living under Israeli occupation since the 1967 Six Day War.
A senior Palestinian official told AFP on condition of anonymity that preparations for the UN gambit would be completed on August 4, during a meeting of an Arab monitoring committee in Doha, attended by Qatar, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
An official letter would be sent to the United Nations during the first week of August, he added.
"To get significant results we have to speak with one voice," Abbas told his audience, adding that the decision to seek UN membership would have the backing of a large consensus, both of his West Bank-based Fatah movement and of the radical Islamist Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip.
"God willing, Palestinian reconciliation will be achieved before we go to the UN," Abbas said, referring to a formal end to years of enmity between the two agreed on April 27, but yet to be implemented politically.
He said 118 countries had already recognised the Palestinian state within the borders that preceded Israeli occupation of the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in June 1967 and that the total would rise to 130 by September.
A joint Palestinian-Israeli poll last month showed that 65 percent of Palestinian respondents supported the UN campaign.
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