By Xinhua
Ramallah : A three-way Israeli, U.S. and Palestinian committee will meet next Thursday to discuss implementing the first phase of roadmap peace plan, the top Palestinian negotiator said on Thursday.
Saeb Erekat told the Voice of Palestine radio station that the meeting will be headed by U.S. General William Fraser appointed by President George W. Bush to oversee the materialization of the U.S.-backed plan.
Under the first phase of the roadmap, Israel has to freeze building and expanding settlements in the West Bank and to withdraw from the territories occupied in the 1967 war.
The plan, in the meantime, calls on the Palestinians to crackdown on militants.
The Palestinians have held presidential and parliamentary elections as the plan calls and nearly stopped violence in the West Bank but not in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
The roadmap plan has been the base for the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks which resumed at a U.S.-hosted conference in November.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, however, suspended statehood talks with Israel on Sunday in protest against the Jewish state’s large-scale offensive in the Gaza Strip.
The five-day incursion last week which combined aerial and ground offensive killed more than 125 Palestinians.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who visited the region on Tuesday, is sending her assistant David Welch to Cairoon Thursday to ask Egypt to mediate between Israel and Hamas to pave the way for the ceasefire.
But Erekat did not rule out the possibility that the negotiations will collapse if Israeli military operations continue.