The United States will offer the moderate Palestinian leadership more than half a billion dollars at Monday's international donors' conference in Paris, a US official said Friday.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas is seeking a total of 5.6 billion dollars between 2008 and 2010 to help tackle poverty, build a viable Palestinian state and give impetus to a new peace process with Israel. "The US will make a generous contribution," a government official said on condition of anonymity. "The expectation would be 100 million dollars more than last year's context, in the vicinity of 500 million (dollars) plus."
The figure would still be subject to approval by the US Congress. The administration of US President George W. Bush had asked Congress to approve 400 million in economic support for Palestinians in the 2007-2008 budget which began on October 1. That amount has not been approved. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will fly Sunday to the donors' conference aimed at supporting Palestinian reform of political, security and economic institutions that would underpin a future Palestinian state.
Ninety delegations are expected at the one-day Conference of Donors for a Palestinian State, the biggest of its kind since 1996, which aims to shore up the peace process jumpstarted in the US city of Annapolis last month.
Israel and the Palestinians relaunched negotiations frozen for seven years that are aimed at settling thorny problems like the status of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees and the borders of a future Palestinian state.
The United States wants to shore up Abbas, whose secular Fatah faction was driven out of the Gaza Strip by the radical Islamist Hamas movement during heavy fighting in June.
Listed in Washington as a terrorist group, Hamas stunned many when it won elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 2006. Prior to the election win, US aid to the Palestinians amounted to about 250 million dollars per year.
Since then, the United States has spent money bit by bit on the Palestinians, particularly through the release of 40 million dollars in emergency aid to Gaza residents last June.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters that Rice will meet Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in Paris on Sunday. French President Nicolas Sarkozy will formally open proceedings, at Abbas' side, with a speech at 9:30 am (0830 GMT) on Monday, before handing over to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.
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