Fatah official says PA president Abbas is presenting his diplomatic plan to the international community and applying for International Criminal Court membership.

The U.S. is apparently not on board.

By i24news

The Palestinians are ready to go ahead and apply for International Criminal Court membership and take Israel to the court, Senior Fatah official Mohammed Ashtiya declared Thursday, Israeli daily Haaretz reported.

US Secretary of State John Kerry (left) shakes hands with Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas during their meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah, on July 23, 2014 – Photo: Pool/AFP

“The indictment against Israel at the International Criminal Court and all the accompanying documents are ready,” Ashtiya, a Fatah Central Committee member, said at a press conference in Ramallah. “We are telling the Israelis and the International community that we are very serious,” he said. “Abu Mazen (Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas) is presenting his diplomatic plan to the international community and this time we will demand a timetable for ending the occupation and not negotiations.”

US Secretary of State John Kerry met for over two hours Wednesday with Palestinian negotiators for “constructive” talks on future relations with Israel, a US official said. The talks come just days after Israel announced its biggest grab of Palestinian land since the 1980s, and as a new showdown looms at the United Nations with the increasingly frustrated Palestinians planning to push a resolution setting a three-year deadline to end the Israeli occupation.

US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power on Wednesday pushed back at the Palestinian call for the Security Council to support a three-year time frame for the end to Israeli occupation but did acknowledge that Israel’s expanded settlement activity was contrary to its goal of achieving a two state solution.

“To secure a permanent peace Israel has to be part of that negotiation just as a practical matter, to think that you can come to New York and secure what needs to be worked out on the ground is not realistic and in fact is likely to have very counterproductive effects on whether, on the sustainable ceasefire that we seek for what has… whereby a ceasefire has just been negotiated. You don’t want to do anything that interferes with that or risk that and ultimately in order to again secure the desired outcome the parties are going to have to come together and it is going to have to be negotiated with the government of Israel,” Power said while addressing the UN press corps having assumed the Presidency of the Council for the month of September.

Kerry had spoken Tuesday by phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, expressing his concerns about new Israeli plans to confiscate some 400 hectares of land in the West Bank for Jewish settlement building. The US has called on Israel to reverse the decision.

A Palestinian source said in response that, “We understand that the United States is busy now with other matters and therefore we are not presenting an ultimatum and we are not threatening but we expect that within a month or two the picture will be clearer with regard to the position of the United States.”

View original i24news publication at: http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/middle-east/42598-140904-palestinians-we-are-ready-to-indict-israel-in-icc