Palestinian government strongly criticizes Barak's settlement policy

The Palestinian government launched a severe attack on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's settlement policy and described it as destroying the peace process at a time when the Palestinians and Israelis side failed to reach an agreement concerning releasing a second group of the Palestinian detainees from Israeli prisons.

Palestinian Minister of Culture and Information Yasser Abed Rabbo, the head of the Palestinian delegation to the final status negotiations, said, "The decision of Tel Aviv's government of evacuating some of the random settlements in the West Bank is considered a kind of misleading and cheating practiced by the former Israeli government," adding that this decision "dedicates the legality of the settling spots held by the Jewish extremists through their seizure of Palestinian lands."

Abed Rabbo warned that it is not a decision for evacuating settlements, but it is a decision to prove the legality of new settlements in a style invented by former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.