Israel halts east Jerusalem building
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However, two city councilmen and an engineer who oversees a major east Jerusalem construction project confirmed the procedures for approving new housing have been put on hold since the Biden incident.
"The government ordered the Interior Ministry immediately after the Biden incident to not even talk about new construction for Jewish homes in east Jerusalem," said Meir Margalit, a city councilman who said the information came from top Jerusalem officials intimately involved with construction projects.
"It's not just that building has stopped: The committees that deal with this are not even meeting anymore," said Margalit, of the dovish Meretz Party.
Another city councilman, Meir Turujamen, who sits on the Interior Ministry committee that gives final approval to building plans, said his panel has not met since the Biden visit. It used to meet weekly, he said.
"I wrote a letter about three weeks or a month ago asking (Interior Minister Eli) Yishai why the committee isn't convening," he said. "To this day I haven't received an answer."
Interior Ministry spokeswoman Efrat Orbach insisted any delays were nothing more than a bureaucratic matter.
The prime minister's spokesman, Mark Regev, said only that "following the Biden visit and the mishap, the prime minister asked that a mechanism be put in place to prevent a recurrence of this kind of debacle." He would not elaborate.
In Washington, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley wouldn't discuss what Israel was telling the United States about Jewish construction.
"We have asked both sides to take steps to rebuild trust and to create momentum so that we can see advances" in peace talks, Crowley told reporters. "We're not going to go into details about what we've asked them to do, but obviously this is an important issue in the atmosphere to see the advancement of peace."
Netanyahu repeatedly has insisted that Israel has a right to build anywhere in the city's eastern sector, which Palestinians hope to make their future capital, and acknowledging any slowdown would have huge political risks. Netanyahu's coalition is dominated by hard-liners who oppose any division of Jerusalem.
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