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Report: PA Rejects Israeli Leasing Proposal for Jordan Valley

(Times of Israel) Naama Barak and Lazar Berman - As part of ongoing peace talks, Israeli negotiators offered to transfer sovereignty over the Jordan Valley to the Palestinian Authority, which would in turn lease it back to Israel. Palestinian representatives rejected the idea out of hand, the Maariv daily reported last week. Israel signed a similar leasing agreement with Jordan as part of the 1994 peace accords, in which Israel acknowledged Jordanian sovereignty over 300 sq. km. along the border, and leased back 30 sq. km. in automatically renewed long-term leases. "No Israeli soldier will be there," Palestinian National Council member Hanan Ashrawi told Maariv. "We will not agree [to] control or lease lands." "Netanyahu...refuses to discuss the option of placing international forces in the Jordan Valley." Israel insists on having an IDF presence on the Israeli-Jordanian border, which gives the narrow country some measure of strategic depth and early warning on its eastern border, and rejected an American proposal to place an international force there. In a reference to Israeli demands that Israel maintain a buffer zone in the Jordan Valley, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that Israeli negotiators "will have to convince the Palestinians to adjust their demands to the circumstances around us." Israel must maintain a security presence in the Jordan Valley "precisely as Yitzhak Rabin insisted."
2013-10-21 00:00:00
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