AP, Jerusalem :Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said Saturday that eight months after a bloody war in the Gaza Strip the situation there remains “intolerable.”Carter and his delegation were supposed to visit the isolated territory but earlier this week called it off siting unspecified security concerns. Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, Carter said he was still determined to work for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.”What we have seen and heard only strengthens our determination to work for peace,” he said. “The situation in Gaza is intolerable. Eight months after a devastating war, not one destroyed house has been rebuilt and people cannot live with the respect and dignity they deserve.”More than 2,000 Palestinians were killed in the 50-day summer war between Israeli forces and Hamas militants who fired rockets into Israel.Earlier in the day, Carter, 90, visited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah and laid a wreath on the grave of former leader Yasser Arafat.Carter was accompanied by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway and fellow member of his Elders group.But Carter was shunned by Israeli leaders who long have considered him hostile to the Jewish state.Although he brokered the first Israeli-Arab peace treaty during his presidency, Carter outraged many Israelis with his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” He’s also repeatedly reached out to Gaza’s Islamic Hamas leaders, considered terrorists by much of the West.Carter did meet with a group of Israelis living in towns bordering Gaza and heard about life under the threat of rocket attacks and militant infiltrations from Gaza. But he said that he had no interest in meeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has ignored him in the past.”This time we decided it was a waste of time to ask,” Carter said. “As long as he is in charge, there will be no two-state solution and therefore no Palestinian state.”Ex-US president Carter urges Palestinian electionsAnother report adds: Former US president Jimmy Carter on Saturday urged Palestinians to hold elections to end the de facto division of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Islamist-run Gaza Strip.He was speaking at a joint news conference with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in the Palestinian political capital Ramallah in the West Bank.”We hope that sometime we’ll see elections all over the Palestinian area and east Jerusalem and Gaza and also in the West Bank,” said Carter, a member of the independent Elders Group of global leaders.No election has been held in the occupied territories for nearly a decade.Abbas’s presidential mandate expired in 2009, but he remains in office since there has been no election. The Palestinian parliament has also not met since 2007.In 2006, a year after Abbas was elected, Hamas won the most recent Palestinian legislative elections. Differences between Abbas’s Fatah party and the Islamist Hamas then led to the so-called “inqissam”, or division.Despite the rivals signing a reconciliation agreement a year ago, Hamas is reluctant to hand over power in Gaza to an independent Palestinian unity government they formed.Carter had also planned to go to Gaza, but the visit was cancelled at the last moment.He said it was “very important” that there be “full implementation of the agreement reached between Hamas and Fatah”.Carter was accompanied by Norway’s former prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.She said that despite not being able to visit the impoverished Palestinian enclave devastated by last summer’s war with Israel, “we have had a chance to discuss with people who know the issues in Gaza”.Reconstruction of the territory has not begun eight months after the end of the conflict, the third in six years.The pair also held a news conference in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem during which they both denounced the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies.
