AMMAN - Israel is willing to hold peace talks with the Palestinians immediately, in Jerusalem or even Ramallah, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in excerpts of an interview released on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians sounded confident in their bid to obtain UN recognition of their envisaged state.

Speaking to Arabic-language television station Al Arabiya, Netanyahu also denied that Israel wanted to see Syrian President Bashar Assad remain in power, and acknowledged that he had held secret peace talks with Damascus in the past.

The Israeli premier blamed a stalemate in talks with the Palestinians on their leadership.

"Everything is on the table," he said. "But we need to get to the table."

He said the Palestinian leadership had in the past not wanted to conclude negotiations, and now it was unwilling to even restart talks.

"I'm prepared to negotiate with President [Mahmoud] Abbas directly for peace between our two peoples right now. We can do it here in my home in Jerusalem, we can do it in Ramallah [in the West Bank], we can do it anywhere," he said.

Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been on hold since late September 2010, shortly after Washington relaunched the first direct negotiations between the two sides for nearly two years.

The talks ground to a halt when Israel's partial freeze on settlement construction expired and Netanyahu declined to renew it. The Palestinians say they will not hold talks while Israel builds on land they want for a future state.

To counter the negotiations' stalemate, Palestinians have pledged to seek UN recognition of their independent state within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital in a move widely expected to take place in September.

Israel is fiercely opposed to such a move, arguing that negotiations are the only way to end the conflict and establish a Palestinian state.

But the Israeli government refuses to halt its settlement activities and in the nine months since the end of the building freeze, work has begun on at least 2,000 housing units in 75 different settlements, according to settlement watchdog Peace Now.

The latest settlement activity includes issuing tenders for 336 new housing units in two West Bank settlements on Monday.

Condemning the decision, Nabil Abu Rudeina, spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said it is “all the more reason to go to the United Nations and to the Security Council to seek recognition of a Palestinian state and full UN membership”.

Later Wednesday, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations said he was confident of success in September.

“We will not fail at this session of the General Assembly, but the extent of our success will depend on many factors that are evolving,” said Ambassador Riyad Mansur, citing what he described as “balance of power” diplomacy.

“The Israelis have acknowledged their defeat by saying they will count it a success if they manage to convince 30 countries not to vote for our resolution,” he said, referring to Israel’s desire to secure a “moral majority” of democratic countries voting against the bid.

“But they will still be defeated because they will not get the 30 countries to vote against us,” he said.

Palestinian reconciliation

The prospects for new talks have also been thrown into further jeopardy by a reconciliation deal between Abbas’ Fateh Party and Hamas, which rules Gaza.

Netanyahu said it was impossible to seek peace with any group that does not recognise Israel’s right to exist.

“If people say no, the state of Israel shouldn’t exist, it should be wiped off the face of the earth, the way Iran or Hizbollah or Hamas say, there’s not much place to go.”

But Hamas said it had no plans to stop Fateh from holding peace negotiations without its participation.

Abbas said the interim unity government would not dictate policy when it came to negotiations, which would remain the mandate of the Palestine Liberation Organisation he heads.

Asked about Syria, Netanyahu denied media reports that Israel wanted to see the regime stay in power. But he acknowledged that he had held peace talks with Damascus in the past and was concerned that anti-regime protests could lead to a rise in the long-quiet border between Israel and Syria.

“We don’t intervene in what happens in Syria, but we obviously would like to have peaceful relations,” he said.

“Several people tried including myself in secret negotiations to move towards a formal peace,” he added.

Netanyahu said it would be counterproductive for Israel to offer support for pro-reform demonstrators in its neighbour, and that he hoped Israel would not see tensions on its border rise as the uprising continues to shake Syria.

“I hope that no one in Syria thinks of having a distraction... to heat up the border between us. And I hope that Iran or Hizbollah are not tempted to do this in order to shift attention away from what’s happening in Syria.”

Mass September protests

Meanwhile, Jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouthi has called for large-scale peaceful protests in support of the Palestinian bid for United Nations membership in September.

In a statement released from his cell in Israel’s Hadarim prison, Barghouthi, who is widely considered as the architect of the second Palestinian Intifada, said winning the “battle of next September” would require mass mobilisation in the territories and abroad.

“Winning the battle of next September, which is an important step in our struggle, requires the biggest peaceful popular protests here and in the diaspora, and in Arab and Muslim countries and international capitals,” Barghouthi said in the statement, obtained by AFP.

“This means the mobilisation of all the energies of our people and the involvement of everyone in this battle.”

“It’s not just the fight of President Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the Palestinian Authority, the factions or the embassies,” he said.

“It’s the fight of every citizen, every Palestinian and Arab, every free person in the world.”

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - Tens of thousands of Somalis are feared dead in the world's worst famine in a generation, the UN said Wednesday, and the US said it will allow emergency funds to be spent in areas controlled by Al Qaeda-linked militants as long as the fighters do not interfere with aid distributions.

Exhausted, rail-thin women are stumbling into refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia with dead babies and bleeding feet, having left weaker family members behind along the way.

"Somalia is facing its worst food security crisis in the last 20 years," said Mark Bowden, the UN's top official in charge of humanitarian aid in Somalia. "This desperate situation requires urgent action to save lives ... it's likely that conditions will deteriorate further in six months."

The crisis is the worst since 1991-92, when hundreds of thousands of Somalis starved to death, Bowden said. That famine prompted intervention by an international peacekeeping force, but it eventually pulled out after two American Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in 1993.

Since then, Western nations have mainly sought to contain the threat of terrorism from Somalia - an anarchic nation where the weak government battles Islamic militants on land and pirates hijack ships for millions of dollars at sea.

Oxfam said $1 billion is needed for famine relief. On Wednesday, the US announced an additional $28 million in emergency funding on top of the $431 million in assistance already given this year.

Most importantly, as long as the Islamists don't interfere with aid distributions, those new US funds aren't restricted under rules implemented in 2009 that are designed to keep food and money from being stolen by the insurgency.

"If [the insurgents] are willing to allow access we are willing to stand fully with the humanitarian actors," said Dr Raj Shah, head of the US Agency for International Development.

Aid groups have repeatedly called for the restrictions to be lifted and say the rules severely limited their operations in the past two years. US humanitarian contributions in Somalia fell from $237 million in 2008 to $29 million last year.

"We've seen a very large shortfall over the past few years given the political restrictions attached to humanitarian funding," said Tanja Schumer of the Somalia NGO Consortium, which represents 78 aid agencies working on Somalia. "To get American money we have to vouch for all our contractors and all our local partners and that is tricky."

Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations, blamed Al Shabaab for exacerbating the crisis.

"The reason the aid hasn't gone in sufficient quantities into south and central Somalia is because Al Shabaab has prevented those capable of delivering large quantities of aid from having access - and when they have had access they've taxed them, harassed them, killed them, kidnapped them," Rice told reporters at UN headquarters in New York.

Somalia is the most dangerous country in the world to work in, according to the UN's World Food Programme, which has lost 14 relief workers in the past few years. Kidnappings, killings and attacks on aid convoys occur frequently. Two years ago WFP pulled out of Islamist-controlled southern Somalia after the rebels demanded cash payments and other concessions.

US military operations against terrorism suspects also have disrupted humanitarian operations, said Bowden. Insurgents vowed to target foreign aid workers after a US missile strike killed the head of the Islamist Al Shabaab militia and 24 other people in 2008. Aden Hashi Ayro was reputedly Al Qaeda's commander in Somalia and linked to a string of attacks on foreign aid workers and journalists.

But WFP head Josette Sheeran said the agency is willing to return to southern Somalia if the insurgents guarantee safe passage and free access to aid. Two regions of Somalia - Bakool and Lower Shabelle - are suffering from famine and eight more are at risk.

"We are absolutely fully committed to going where the hungry are," she said.

The Horn of Africa is suffering a devastating drought compounded by war, neglect, poor land policies and spiralling prices. Some areas in the region have not had such a low rainfall in 60 years, aid group Oxfam said. Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti have all been badly affected, and Eritrea is also believed to be suffering, although its repressive government does not release figures.

Yet only parts of Somalia are technically suffering from famine, defined as when two adults or four children per 10,000 people die of hunger each day and a third of children are acutely malnourished.

In some areas of Somalia, six people are dying a day and more than half of children are acutely malnourished, Bowden said. Prices of staple foods have increased 270 per cent over the last year, compounding the misery.

Somalia's civil war is partly to blame, said Joakim Gundel, who heads Katuni Consult, a Nairobi-based company often asked to evaluate international aid efforts in Somalia.

He said aid groups found fundraising easier if they blamed natural disaster rather admitting the emergency was partly caused by a complex, 20-year civil war worsened by international apathy and incompetence.