Agence France Press

WASHINGTON/PARIS: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a cool welcome Monday to a French plan to host a Middle East peace conference, saying it must be linked to a willingness to resume talks.
“The idea of any gathering, conference or meeting has to be linked to a willingness by the parties to resume negotiating,” the chief U.S. diplomat said during a news conference with her French counterpart Alain Juppe.
“We strongly support a return to negotiations but we do not think that it would be productive for there to be a conference about returning to negotiations,” she said.

Israel and the Palestinians have been at loggerheads over the negotiations, which came to a halt shortly after they were relaunched in Washington in September 2010 when a partial freeze on Israeli settlement construction expired.
Israel refused to renew the freeze and the Palestinians insist they will not hold talks while settlements are being built.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has since insisted his participation in the Paris conference be conditional on using the lines that existed before the 1967 war as the basis for negotiating future borders.
“There has to be a return to negotiations, which will take a lot of persuasion and preliminary work in order to set up a productive meeting between the parties,” said Clinton.
“Right now, we’re still in a wait-and-see attitude because we don’t yet have an insurance form either party that they would return to negotiations.”

Juppe, who returned from the region last week, sounded an optimistic note. “I am rather pleasantly surprised because the Palestinians have reacted positively, the Israelis did not say no and the secretary of state said ‘let’s wait and see,’” he said.
“The status quo does not benefit anyone. It bodes badly for the U.N. General Assembly” in September, at which the Palestinians are expected to seek official recognition for their future state, Juppe added.

Elsewhere Monday, the parents of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, captured by Palestinian militants in Gaza in 2006, filed suit in a Paris court against his kidnapping and illegal imprisonment.
The complaint by the parents of Shalit, who also has French citizenship, is being taken against persons unknown but clearly identifies Hamas.
Hamas, which took control of Gaza a year after Shalit’s capture, has demanded the return of hundreds of prisoners in exchange for his release.

Shalit, now 24, was seized in a 2006 dawn cross-border raid by militants from three Palestinian groups, including Hamas.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe met last week with Shalit’s parents in Jerusalem and assured them that France was determined to do all it could to secure his release.