国际英语新闻：Fayyad vows to establish Palestinian state

JERUSALEM, Feb. 2 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said Tuesday the wide acceptance of the two-state concept is key to the Middle-East peace process.

"There cannot be peace unless the perception that the Palestinians must have a state is fully accepted," Israeli news service Ynet quoted Fayyad as saying at the Herzliya Conference.

The Conference is an annual meeting held in northern Israeli city of Herzliya to discuss Israel's regional and strategic security.

Fayyad noted that the Palestinians are ready to establish their state by 2011, and "we have made progress in creating an infrastructure in the past two years."

Fayyad released a plan in August 2009, announcing that practical steps would be taken to build a de facto Palestinian state in mid-2011 regardless of the outcome of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks.

At the Herzliya Conference, the Palestinian prime minister called on Israel to end occupation and evacuate the Jewish settlements so as to fulfill the two-state solution.

"The Palestinian state must be built in the areas where the settlements are today. One of the main ways to move forward towards the implementation of the Road Map is by stopping Israel's infiltration into territories slated to be part of our state," Fayyad was quoted as saying.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, addressing the conference before Fayyad, said that the Israeli government has accepted the Road Map and the two-state solution, calling on the Palestinians to resume negotiations between the two sides.

"The negotiations will take time, perhaps a year or two, and a final status agreement could take three years, but it is time to enter negotiations and stop playing games," Israeli daily Ha'aretz quoted Barak as saying.

At present, expectations are low for a resumption of negotiation between the two sides anytime soon.

Israel has stressed that the government-announced 10-month moratorium on new construction projects in West Bank settlements represented a rare opportunity for the Palestinians to sit down and start peace talks.

Yet the Palestinians stand firm with their demand that Israel completely halt Jewish settlement construction both in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim as the capital of their future state, before they return to the negotiating table.