RAMALLAH, February 9, 2011 (WAFA) – The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Wednesday denounced the latest statement by the Middle East quartet, expressing its disappointment at its content, according to a statement issued by the PLO’s secretariat.

The quartet, composed of the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations, met in Munich on Saturday and issued a mild statement calling on the Palestinians and Israelis to resume negotiations while criticizing Israeli settlement policies.

The PLO statement said that “The Executive Committee expresses its big disappointment at and regret from the latest quartet statement and considers evading its duties toward the peace process under the pretext of the events in Egypt … makes Israel proceed in its expansionist and settlement plans in the Palestinian Territory.”

It said that while the quartet was meeting, the government of Israel, “and in blatant violation of the will of the international community,” announced that it was going to build 200 units for Jews in the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem “with a goal to turn it into a Jewish neighborhood and end the legitimate Palestinian presence there.”

Israel, it added, “did not care about the shy criticism of settlements.”

The PLO said it was not any more satisfied with “slogans raised by the international community, particularly the quartet, about their belief in the two-state solution and recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to establish their independent state ... because the daily Israeli behavior on the Palestinian land undermines, and forever, any meaning of establishing an independent and sovereign Palestinian state on all its land occupied in 1967.”

The PLO called on the quartet to adopt a more effective stand from the Middle East conflict by directly recognizing the borders of the Palestinian state as the lines of June 4, 1967 and to immediately ask the UN Security Council to declare the settlements illegal and void.

M.A.