Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said on Monday he was "very close" to reaching a peace agreement with Israel before a new right-wing government assumed power at the end of March. "We were very close to reaching an agreement with the Israeli side, and then the new government came and said we had to start from zero," he said, referring to hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government.
"We sat and negotiated with the Israelis over drawing borders and we negotiated these borders with (former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert and (former Foreign Minister Tzipi) Livni," Abbas said during a meeting with Palestinian businessmen in his West Bank headquarters.
"We had started to exchange maps... If we had finished with this then we could have finished with the issue of Jerusalem and the settlements and water," he added, listing some of the core issues of the decades-old conflict. "As far as refugees, we discussed the principle of return but we differed on the numbers," he said, referring to the fate of the 4.7 million UN-registered Palestinian refugees scattered across the Middle East.