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Ramallah - Jordan's King Abdullah II paid a rare visit to the West Bank Monday, in a show of support for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and to add weight to international calls for a revival of peace talks with Israel.
Jordan supports efforts by the Quartet of Middle East mediators - the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia - to resume direct negotiations, Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, who accompanied Abdullah, told reporters.
Judeh strongly condemned Israel's settlement activity, but added that Israeli-Palestinian agreement on the two issues of security and borders would put an end to it.
Although Abbas frequently travels to Amman, Abdullah's visit to Ramallah, which lasted just over two hours, was the king's first to the West Bank in 11 years.
It was also seen as a countergesture, after the Jordanian cabinet announced it would allow Abbas' rival, Khaled Mashaal of Hamas, to make a first official visit to Amman since the radical Islamist Palestinian movement was expelled from Jordan in 1999.
A senior Palestinian official, Hanan Ashrawi, said Abdullah's visit was aimed at showing the expected meeting with Mashaal did not mean a choice between the Hamas leader or Abbas.
The Jordanians were underscoring they recognize only one legitimate Palestinian leadership, she told dpa.
Judeh confirmed Mashaal was scheduled to visit Jordan, but gave no date.
The visit was announced only a day in advance, and comes ahead of a meeting set for Thursday between Abbas and Mashaal in Cairo.
Abbas, of the secular Fatah movement, and Mashaal have been trying since May to negotiate a unity government and end a bitter feud of more than four years that has created a de facto split between Hamas-ruled Gaza and the Abbas-governed West Bank.
Washington has been pressuring Abbas not to reconcile with Hamas, unless Hamas: accepts past interim peace accords that call for a two-state solution to the conflict; renounces violence; and recognizes Israel's right to exist.
Judeh expressed support for the Palestinian efforts to reconcile and reunite the West Bank and Gaza.
'Palestinian unity is a matter of principle for the king. Jordan supports Palestinian unity,' he said.
The Quartet's efforts to revive long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have so far born no fruit, with Abbas conditioning direct negotiations on an Israeli settlement freeze.
Abbas has been under pressure from the West to give up his precondition.
A Jordanian royal court statement, which announced the visit Sunday, said it was meant to back 'the Palestinian Authority and people' and to push forward the stalled peace process.
Judeh also referred to remarks by an ultra-right Israeli legislator that a Palestinian state should be established in Jordan, which have sparked uproar in Jordan.
His delegation had come to support the Palestinian Authority against all those who talk about Jordan as an alternative Palestinian homeland, Judeh said.
Arieh Eldad, of the National Union party, which has four mandates in the 120-seat Knesset, has been a long-time advocate of a Palestinian state in Jordan as an alternative to one in the West Bank. But his repeated remarks have been rejected even by hardline Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
Lieberman last week sent a reassuring message to Amman and told an Israeli parliamentary committee that such talk was against Israel's interest, against reality and badly damaging.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry official would not comment on Monday's visit and the fact that Israel was excluded from it. When Abdullah made his previous visits to the West Bank as king, in April and August 2000, he also met then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, although he avoided a parley taking place in Jerusalem. Jordan does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the city.
Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan in the Six-Day War of 1967, but the two signed a peace treaty in 1994.
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