VATICAN CITY: Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday voiced "deep sadness" over clashes in occupied east Jerusalem where Israel has defied international pressure with a plan to step up construction.
"I am deeply saddened by the recent clashes and tensions that have arisen once again in this city that is the spiritual home of Christians, Jews and Muslims," Benedict said after reciting his weekly Angelus prayer.
He urged "those responsible for the fate of Jerusalem to take the path of peace with courage and to follow it with perseverance."
At an Arab League summit on Saturday, Palestinian president Mahmpud Abbas ruled out US-brokered indirect peace talks with Israel unless it halts settlements and urged his Arab peers to "rescue" Jerusalem.
Abbas accused Israel of seeking to wipe out the Arab identity of Jerusalem through "ethnic cleansing" and insisted that Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem must be the capital of any future Palestinian state.
Fresh US efforts to broker indirect Israeli-Palestinian peace talks earlier this month were stillborn when Israel announced plans to build 1,600 new homes for Jewish settlers in east Jerusalem.
The timing of the announcement during a visit to Israel by US Vice President Joe Biden enraged Washington and the Palestinians, who just days earlier had agreed to give peace talks another chance after a year-long hiatus.
On March 16 hundreds of Palestinians clashed with Israeli security forces across east Jerusalem in the worst rioting in years and a senior Hamas leader called for a new "intifada" or uprising.
Israel captured Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it in a move not recognized by the international community.
The blockaded Gaza Strip saw the worst violence in 14 months when Israeli tanks carried out an incursion, killing a Palestinian militant on Saturday after the army lost two soldiers in clashes the previous day along the border with the coastal strip.
