Rice faults Israel on W. Bank settlements

Wrapping up a Middle East visit to push forward Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday criticized Israel’s continued building in West Bank settlements.

The Jerusalem municipality said it had approved plans for building 600 new homes in Pisgat Zeev, a neighborhood built on West Bank land annexed to the city after the 1967 Middle East War.

In addition, the ultra-Orthodox Shas party said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had promised to build 800 more homes in Betar Ilit, a town of strictly Orthodox Jews near Jerusalem that is one of the fastest-growing settlements in the West Bank.

“We continue to state America’s position that settlement activity should stop, that its expansion should stop,” Rice said at a news conference after talks in Amman, Jordan, with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

The U.S.-backed peace plan known as the road map, the basis of the renewed negotiations, requires Israel to freeze all settlement activity and obliges the Palestinians to break up and disarm militant groups.

Disputes over continued Israeli settlement construction hampered early rounds of the talks, which were relaunched in November at a conference in the United States.

The Palestinians assert that continued settlement expansion undermines the negotiations and prospects for a territorially viable Palestinian state.

Rice, who met Monday with the Israeli and Palestinian chief negotiators, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Ahmed Korei, said the talks, about which neither side has disclosed anything of substance, were making progress.

She gave no specific account of what had been achieved but expressed confidence that an agreement could be reached before President Bush leaves office in January. “I fully believe that it is a goal we can reach,” she said. Bush is expected in Israel in May to participate in celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the state’s creation.