Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is expected to slam Israel next week at the conference of donor nations to be held in Paris. According to a draft of his speech obtained by Haaretz, Abbas will demand that Israel stop all building in parts of Jerusalem liberated during the Six-Day War in the 1967, insisting the area belongs to the PA, along with Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Quartet envoy Tony Blair said Wednesday he will make an appeal at the conference to raise $5.6 billion from the international community for a three-year program to cover the PA's massive deficit and begin economic and other development programs. The PA has been campaigning for Israel to hand over half of Jerusalem so it can transform the city's eastern neighborhoods into the capital of a future PA state. Currently at issue is the decision by Israel's Housing Ministry to issue a long-standing competitive bid for construction of a 307-unit housing project in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa. The plan was approved by the government ten years ago and, as with many other housing projects, finally made it through the rest of the bureaucratic red tape two weeks ago. The international furor over the project was set off unintentionally by two low-level bureaucrats who signed the tender for the project last week. Little did the two Housing Ministry workers, Dubi Gal and Sarah Zimmerman, know that their signatures on a decade-long pending tender would cause such a ruckus, said a senior government official. Zimmerman has even been accused of delaying issuing of construction permits, Haaretz reported. The United States joined the European Union and United Nations in condemning Israel for completing the red tape needed to get the project underway. PA official Ahmed Qureia, who led the PA negotiating team in the first post-Annapolis meeting this week with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and the team of Israeli negotiators, threatened to stall further talks if the housing project was not scrapped. "This affair has sabotaged negotiations and cast a shadow on the international donor states meeting next week," lamented a government official.
