PLO calls for UN Security Council meet on settlements

The Palestine Liberation Organisation called on Saturday for an emergency UN Security Council meeting on Israel's policy of building Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. The call came after news that a controversial meeting between Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas and Israel's vice premier, Shaul Mofaz, had been called off. "The PLO executive committee has decided to call for the Security Council to convene an urgent meeting to discuss settlements," the committee said after a meeting in the West Bank political capital of Ramallah. "We have decided to undertake contacts with all international blocs for the Security Council to adopt a resolution against settlements and for them to be stopped," it said after the meeting in which Abbas took part. A planned Abbas-Mofaz encounter on Sunday has been "postponed to a later date," a senior Palestinian official in Ramallah said earlier, without giving a reason or a new date. The delay came after a disputed vote on Friday in which UNESCO, the UN's cultural body, granted world heritage status to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, another West Bank city. Young activists want the planned meeting with Mofaz, a former general, chief of staff and then defence minister during the 2000-2005 intifada, to be called off altogether, accusing him of "crimes" against the Palestinian people. On Saturday, 200 youths rallied in Ramallah and clashed with security forces as they tried to march on the presidential palace, with several of them beaten up and seven of the protesters briefly detained, an AFP correspondent said. Three of those beaten up were hospitalised. The Abbas-Mofaz talks were to have been the highest-level meeting between Israeli and Palestinian officials since May 12, when Israeli negotiator Yitzhak Molcho met Abbas to deliver a letter from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Peace talks between the two sides have been on hold since late September 2010, with the Palestinians refusing to resume them without a moratorium on Israeli settlement building.