Netanyahu rejects French peace conference as Valls visits Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected French attempts to organise an international conference to restart Middle East peace talks. At a meeting with French Prime Minister Manuel Valls he proposed bilateral talks with the Palestinians instead.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls in Tel Aviv on Sunday AFP

Netanyahu told Valls that direct talks were "the only way to proceed to peace," and suggested "a different French initiative" of face-to-face talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Paris.

Valls promised to talk to President François Hollande about that proposal.

Valls was on the second day of a visit to Israel, where he had gone to explain the French initiative to Netanyahu.

The Israeli prime minister had already reacted negatively to the idea when French Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault discussed it with him earlier this month.

France has called a meeting of foreign ministers from about 20 countries, without the Israelis or Palestinians, for 3 June to try to lay the basis for a multilateral peace conference in the autumn.

The Palestinians have welcomed the move.They refuse to meet the Israelis unless the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank is halted.

"For sure Israel will all the time say that they would like to make mutual negotiations between us and the Palestinians," Palestinian National  Council member Zuhair Sanduka told RFI. "And as usual we made negotiations for about 22 years and all these were in vain because Israel knows that there is no balance between Israelis and Palestinians.

"All the time they didn't do anything which helped the negotiations to be successful and all the time they go on with their policy of confiscation more Palestinian lands and establishing more settlements."

Valls was to hold talks in Ramallah on Tuesday with Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah.

Before meeting Natanyahu, Valls visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and the graves of victims of anti-Semitic attacks in France - including Mohammed Merah's attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 and Ahmed Coulibaly's attack on a kosher supermarket in January 2015.

An upsurge in violence since October has killed 204 Palestinians and 28 Israelis, although the unrest has steadily declined in recent weeks.

Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, Israeli authorities say.