RAMALLAH, West Bank (AFP) — Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Wednesday slammed Israel's decision to expand a Jewish settlement in east Jerusalem, saying it would undermine the peace process relaunched last week.
In a letter sent to US President George W. Bush Abbas, he demanded that Israel reverse the proposed expansion of the Har Homa settlement, according to Saleh Raafat, a senior member of Abbas's Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
The letter calls on Israel to "adhere to all the commitments it announced at the Annapolis conference, most importantly an immediate halt to settlement activity in the West Bank and east Jerusalem," Raafat told AFP.
"The letter affirmed that the continuation of settlement activities is bound to undermine the peace process and negotiations between the two sides."
Abbas and Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert revived the Middle East peace process after a seven-year hiatus last week at an international conference in the US city of Annapolis attended by some 50 countries and organisations.
The two sides have agreed to proceed on the basis of the 2003 roadmap, a blueprint for peace that calls on Israel to freeze all settlement activity and for the Palestinians to improve security.
But on Tuesday Israel said it has invited bids to build more than 300 new housing units in Har Homa, a settlement in annexed east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians have demanded as the capital of their future state.
Israel does not consider construction in east Jerusalem -- which it captured in the 1967 Six-Day war -- as settlement growth because it annexed the Arab part of the Holy City shortly after the conflict.
But the PLO's powerful executive committee issued a statement in which it blasted the project as a "serious violation" and called on the United States and the UN Security Council to put pressure on Israel.
The housing project is "a serious violation of the initiatives that were agreed upon before and during Annapolis and undermines the roadmap," it said.
The Har Homa neighbourhood, known to Arabs as Jebel Abu Ghneim, lies on the southeastern edge of Jerusalem on the road to Bethlehem, and is included in the boundaries of the so-called "Greater Jerusalem".
Its construction from the late 1980s on a hill overlooking the town in the occupied West Bank incensed the Palestinian Authority and also provoked criticism in the United States.
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