Arab League foreign ministers meeting in emergency session in Egypt called on Sunday for a fresh international peace conference to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute based on the principle of land for peace.
The Arab ministers also pledged to break financial sanctions on the Palestinian Authority, but gave scant details as to how that would be accomplished.
The ministers, who convened at the Cairo-based Arab League over Wednesday's killing of 19 Palestinian civilians by Israeli fire in Gaza, said in a communique that permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Israel and Arab parties would be invited to attend the peace conference. It would be aimed at "reaching a just and comprehensive solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict on all tracks according to the relevant international resolutions and the principle of land for peace", the communique, adopted unanimously, said.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar of the militant group Hamas side-stepped whether his group would attend such a peace conference alongside Israel.
"Will this conference be held or not? What's the agenda of the conference? We don't know. I leave this matter to the future," he told reporters.
The Israeli army, which says Wednesday's shelling was aimed at preventing rocket attacks on Israel, said the deaths were caused by a technical malfunction.
Israel launched a major offensive in Gaza in June after Palestinian gunmen captured an Israeli soldier and killed two others in a cross-border raid. The military assault has killed more than 370 Palestinians, around half of them civilians. Three Israeli soldiers have been killed.
FINANCIAL SANCTIONS
The ministers said that they would refuse to abide by crippling sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe after Hamas ousted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party in elections in January.
"There will be no compliance with any restriction imposed ... The Arab banks have to transfer money (to the Palestinians)," Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa told a news conference.
The decision came as Hamas and Fatah opened talks on allocating cabinet seats in a unity government that Palestinians hope will lead to the easing of the Western sanctions that have increased hardship in the occupied West Bank and in Gaza.
The Arab ministers said they would agree on mechanisms to bypass the embargo.
Zahar said delivering financial aid through banks would take time. "We will return to the normal ways of transferring money ... It needs some time but the decision itself is very important," he told reporters.
He told ministers that Beit Hanoun, battered by an Israeli offensive and where Wednesday's shelling took place, needed $50 million to be rebuilt. Moussa said Kuwait had pledged $30 million to the Palestinian Authority via the Arab League.
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