Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met with Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz on Tuesday during a rare trip to Israel.
It was the latest in a series of meetings between top Israeli officials and the Palestinian leader.
In late August, the defense minister visited the Palestinian Authority's headquarters in the West Bank for talks with Abbas — the first official meeting at such a level in several years.
According to a senior Palestinian official, Tuesday's meeting marked the first time Abbas met with an Israeli official in Israel since 2010.
The late-night talks took place at Gantz's home in central Israel, a senior Palestinian official said.
What did they discuss?
"The two men discussed security and civil matters," the Israeli Defense Ministry said in a statement.
Gantz told Abbas that he intended to "continue to promote actions to strengthen confidence in the economic and civilian fields, as agreed during their last meeting," it added.
Hussein al-Sheikh, the Palestinian civil affairs minister and a key aide to Abbas, said the meeting "dealt with the importance of creating a political horizon" that leads to a political solution in accordance with international legitimacy resolutions.
He said the pair discussed "the tense field conditions due to the practices of settlers," adding that the meeting dealt with "many security, economic and humanitarian issues."
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Promised land, enemy land: Israel 70 years after independence
Long-held hope is victorious
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, future first prime minister of Israel, declares the state's independence, outlining the Jewish story: "The people kept faith with (the land) throughout their dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom." It was the birth of an internationally recognized Jewish homeland.
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Promised land, enemy land: Israel 70 years after independence
The darkest hour
While the controversial idea of a God-given land for Jews has biblical roots, the Holocaust was a close, powerful backdrop for the significance of Israel's founding. Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews across Europe, and those who survived the concentration camps endured expulsion and forced labor. The above photo shows survivors of the Auschwitz camp following liberation.
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Promised land, enemy land: Israel 70 years after independence
'Nakba': Arabic for 'catastrophe'
Directly after Israel's founding, it was attacked by troops from Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq - among others. Israel pushed back and expanded its control over 77% of Palestinian territory. Some 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes. "Nakba" is what Palestinians call this event. The war encapsulated the still unresolved Mideast conflict sparked in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration.
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Promised land, enemy land: Israel 70 years after independence
Life on a kibbutz
These land collectives, known as kibbutzim in the plural, were established across Israel following independence. Many were run by secular or socialist Jews in an effort to realize their vision of society.
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Promised land, enemy land: Israel 70 years after independence
A state at war
Tensions with its Arab neighbors erupted in the Six-Day War in June 1967. With a surprise attack, Israel is able to swiftly defeat Egypt, Jordan and Syria, bringing the Arab-populated areas of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights under Israeli control. Victory leads to occupation — and more tension and conflict.
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Promised land, enemy land: Israel 70 years after independence
Settlements on disputed territory
Israel's settlement policy worsens the conflict with Palestinians. Due to development and expansion of Jewish areas on occupied Palestinian land, the Palestinian Authority accuses Israel of making a future Palestinian state untenable. Israel has largely ignored the international community's criticism of its settlement policy, arguing new construction is either legal or necessary for security.
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Promised land, enemy land: Israel 70 years after independence
Anger, hate and stones: The first intifada
In winter 1987, Palestinians begin mass protests of Israel's ongoing occupation. Unrest spreads from Gaza to East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The uprising eventually wound down and led to the 1993 Oslo Accords — the first face-to-face agreement between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the representative body of the Palestinian people.
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Promised land, enemy land: Israel 70 years after independence
Peace at last?
With former US President Bill Clinton as a mediator, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (left) and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat hold peace talks. The result, the Oslo I Accord, is each side's recognition of the other. The agreement leads many to hope that an end to the Israel-Palestine conflict is not far off, but peace initiatives suffer a major setback when Rabin is assassinated two years later.
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Promised land, enemy land: Israel 70 years after independence
A void to fill
A right-wing Jewish fanatic shoots and kills Rabin on November 4, 1995, while he is leaving a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Rabin's assassination throws the spotlight on Israel's internal social strife. The divide is growing between centrist and extremist, secular and religious. The photo shows Israel's then-acting prime minister, Shimon Peres, next to the empty chair of his murdered colleague.
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Promised land, enemy land: Israel 70 years after independence
Addressing the unspeakable
Nazi Germany's mass murder of Jews weighs on German-Israeli relations to this day. In February 2000, Germany's then-President Johannes Rau addresses the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in German. It is a tremendous emotional challenge for both sides, especially for Holocaust survivors and their descendants, but also a step towards closer relations after unforgettable crimes.
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Promised land, enemy land: Israel 70 years after independence
The Israeli wall
In 2002, amid the violence and terror of the Second Intifada, Israel starts building a 107-kilometer-long (67-mile-long) barrier of barbed wire, concrete wall and guard towers between itself and Palestinian areas of the West Bank. It suppresses the violence but does not solve the larger political conflict. The wall grows in length over the years and is projected to reach around 700 kilometers.
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Promised land, enemy land: Israel 70 years after independence
A gesture to the dead
Germany's current foreign minister, Heiko Maas, steps decisively into an ever closer German-Israeli relationship. His first trip abroad as the country's top diplomat is to Israel in March 2018. At the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem, he lays a wreath in memory of Holocaust victims.
Author: Kersten Knipp
No ongoing peace process
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said after the meeting in August that there weren't any ongoing peace talks with the Palestinians, "and there won't be one."
While the right-wing leader opposes Palestinian statehood, he has said he wants to reduce friction with the Palestinian Authority and improve living conditions in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Israeli-Palestinian relations have substantially deteriorated in recent years.
Several instances of violence have been reported in the West Bank in recent weeks, including a series of Palestinian attacks on Israelis as well as a surge in violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians.
Peace talks were suspended in 2014, and Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank have since expanded.
The Palestinian Authority seeks an independent state that includes all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
adi/fb (AFP, AP)
