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JERUSALEM: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that creative thinking was needed to end the decades-old conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
"We will need to think creatively, and in new ways, about how to resolve complex problems," he told reporters at the start of Israel's weekly cabinet meeting.
"In order to reach practical solutions, we will need to think about new solutions to old problems," the right-wing premier said, without unveiling specific proposals.
"To succeed, we will need to study the lessons of the 17-year effort at negotiations and to embrace original thinking, to think outside the box," Netanyahu said, referring to the 1993 Palestinian autonomy accords.
The prime minister insisted, however, that he was "willing to achieve an historic compromise with our Palestinian neighbours so long as it maintains the national interests of the state of Israel with security first and foremost."
The two sides relaunched direct peace talks at a Washington summit on Thursday after a 20-month hiatus, but the negotiations will face a major test later this month when an Israeli settlement moratorium expires.
The Palestinians have insisted that if Israel does not renew the partial freeze on settlement construction in the occupied West Bank when it expires on September 26 the peace process will come to an end.
Netanyahu, under pressure from right-wingers who dominate his ruling coalition to resume construction, has said settlements should be discussed alongside other core disputes that have bedeviled past attempts at peace, including the final status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and Netanyahu plan to hold twice-monthly talks starting with a September 14-15 meeting in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
Meanwhile a US State Department official said in Washington that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will attend the talks in Sharm el-Sheikh.
Clinton is due to travel to the Red Sea resort and Jerusalem for the September 14-15 talks between Netanyahu and Abbas, the official said.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat warned on Sunday that should the latest attempt to clinch a peace settlement fail, the moderate Palestinian leadership would disintegrate.
"We hope to bring (about) a Palestinian state. If we fail to bring it now, then I think we'll go home," he told AFP, adding that such a scenario would spell the end of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority.
The collapse of the moderate Palestinian leadership, which has been pursuing a peace deal with Israel since the 1990s, would leave the Islamist Hamas movement - sworn to the Jewish state's destruction - at the head of the national movement.
"If we have an agreement, (Hamas) will disappear, and if we don't have an agreement, then we will disappear," Erakat warned. "I really hope that we can make it, God willing."
- AFP/de
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