U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Martin Indyk is on his way back to the region today (Thursday) to officially revive the talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

State Department spokesperson Marty Harf told reporters at a briefing that both sides have told Secretary of State John Kerry they want to continue negotiations beyond the current April 29 deadline.

Neither side was willing to meet after the terrorist attack in Judea on Monday that killed senior police officer Baruch Mizrahi, a father of five, and wounded his wife and 9-year-old son. The attacker or attackers were standing on the side of the road on Highway 35 near Hevron, shooting at vehicles with Israeli license plates, a witness said. One arrest has allegedly been made but no details were released. Mizrahi was on his way with his family to a seder in Kiryat Arba to celebrate the Passover holiday when he was murdered.

Talks that were scheduled for Wednesday night were cancelled. Both sides were unwilling to negotiate in the face of another Arab terror attack on Jews using an AK-47 – a weapon supplied to PA police by the U.S. military, among others – ostensibly to strengthen its forces so they could ‘fight terror.’

On Thursday, those talks are set to resume with Indyk, Israel’s Justice Minister and chief negotiator Tzipi Livni and negotiator Yitzhak Molcho, and the PA’s chief negotiator Saeb Erekat.

PA spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudaineh told a media briefing in Ramallah that an agreement is already in place to extend the talks.

“The Palestinian commitment is clear to the Israelis and the Americans, and this commitment is that the talks will continue until April 29, and that Israel should release the fourth group of prisoners,” Rudaineh told reporters. “This is the basic Palestinian demand. This is not a Palestinian condition, but it is a Palestinian demand, which was agreed upon with the U.S. secretary of state according to which 104 pre-Oslo prisoners would be released, and in return we would not go to the United Nations organizations for nine months… Now the talks with the Israelis and the Americans are continuing to the end of this month to discuss the basis that could lead to an extension of the negotiations,” he said.

Various proposals are being advanced by Israel in order to wrestle with the issue of the Israeli Arab prisoners among the fourth and final group that was held back due to lack of progress in the talks.

The Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) party has threatened to leave the government if those prisoners – Israeli citizens who are all Arab terrorists – are freed.

One option would be to revoke their citizenship and deport them. Another would be to simply send the entire group to Gaza or abroad. In either case, resistance from the PA is expected – as usual.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu blamed Palestinian Authority incitement for the terrorist attack that left a 46-year-old police officer dead, and his 28-year-old pregnant wife and nine year old son wounded.

A terrorist opened fire at Israeli civilian vehicles traveling along Highway 35, near the western edge of Hevron. Israeli soldiers closed off the area in search of the perpetrators but have yet to make arrests.

Netanyahu issued the statement to media following the murder of Israel Police Chief Superintendent Baruch Mizrahi, of blessed memory. He and his family were traveling on the road to a seder to celebrate Passover in Kiryat Arba at the time of the attack.

Mizrahi is to be laid to rest at 1:00 p.m. local time Wednesday at the military cemetery in Jerusalem, Mount Herzl, in the section reserved for the Israel Police.

Mizrahi served as director of Technology in the SigInt Unit for the Intelligence division of Israel Police since June 2011. He served in various roles in the IDF for 25 years, ending his military career as a Lieutenant Colonel in the 8200 Intelligence Unit.

“Baruch z’l devoted his entire life to two great loves – his family and the State of Israel,” said his commander. His entire unit and Israel Police released a statement expressing their joining the grief of the family and their wishes for a speedy recovery for his wife.

The terrorist responsible for the murder was standing by the side of a road, waiting for targets, armed with an AK-47 assault rifle, also known as a Kalashnikov. He also shot at other cars passing on the road, according to the Tazpit News Agency, which received reports of attacks from other drivers.

The AK-47 is the same weapon supplied to the Palestinian Authority police force by the U.S. government, via Jordan, during military training at an American-funded base in Jericho during the Bush administration under the supervision of U.S. Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton.

“This reprehensible murder of a man who was traveling with his family to a meal for the Festival of Freedom is the result of the incitement for which the Palestinian Authority is responsible. The Palestinian Authority continues to constantly broadcast – in its official media – programs that incite against the existence of the State of Israel,” he said.

“Last night this incitement was translated into the murder of a father who was traveling with his family to celebrate the first night of Passover. The incitement of the Palestinian Authority continues in that it has yet to see fit to condemn this abominable and reprehensible act,” Netanyahu pointed out.

Government Minister Uri Ariel (Bayit Yehudi) released  a statement warning that every PA prisoner release emboldens the terrorists, and demanded the government cancel all future releases. Ariel said the government should require the PA to cancel any unilateral steps at the United Nations as a precondition to continuing any final status talks.

The United States has supplied more than $161 million dollars to the Palestinian Authority for paramilitary training for its security forces. This includes provision of assault rifles, ammunition and other military supplies. There have been a number of terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens committed by so-called “PA police officers” using this equipment.

Although the United States has had the fantasy that the PA security forces would enforce agreements made by its government to abandon violence and restrain terrorist groups in order to “enable” a “two state solution” — that has not worked out. Instead the PA paramilitary force has simply continued along its traditional path of enforcing the corruption of its leaders. Moreover, some of its members have joined – or returned to — terrorist ranks, bringing along with them new knowledge, training and equipment gifted to them from the American government.

These new police terrorists are more dangerous than the garden-variety operatives because they often appear to be security personnel, while being the very opposite.

Once again, on the eve of a major Jewish holiday, Israel Police have  closed access for Jews and Christians to the Temple Mount due to intelligence “there would be disturbances” if Jews were allowed to ascend to the site.

Hundreds of tourists who flocked to the site on Monday were turned away due to violence spawned by Muslim rioters the previous day.

Police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld told The Jewish Press in a telephone interview Monday morning, “Police officials made the decision to close access to the site based on information there would be disturbances similar to those that occurred yesterday, and which caused injuries to two police officers. As a result, access to the site was restricted solely to Muslim men age 50 and above, and to Muslim women of all ages.”

Asked whether Muslim women had never caused any disturbances at the Temple Mount – which they have on numerous occasions — Rosenfeld responded: “Muslim women do not pose any problem for Israel Police. It is Muslim men under age 50 who are the most dangerous to the general population and to police officers during disturbances at the site.”

On Sunday police closed the Temple Mount to visitors — but not to Muslim worshipers — after Muslim rioters hurled rocks and firebombs (Molotov cocktails) at police officers posted at the Mughrabi Gate near the Western Wall Plaza.

Two Israel Police officers were injured in the riot which started when the site was opened to visitors.

Rosenfeld claimed he had “no idea what [you] are talking about” when asked about a report posted on the Arutz Sheva website describing a virtual takeover of the Temple Mount by “dozens of Hamas men… waving Hamas flags and ‘not allowing Jews and tourists into the Mount.’

The site has always been a flash point of contention between Jews and Muslims. There is no holier site in the Jewish faith, and it ranks third in importance in Islam.

The Temple Mount encompasses the Western Wall – the last remnant of the Holy Temple, the western retaining wall of the Temple Mount. It is the wall that was the closest to the Holy of Holies when the Holy Temple once stood in Jerusalem.

In Judaism, the Temple Mount is also known as Mount Moriah, which according to Jewish tradition is the place where the creation of the world began from the Foundation Stone at the peak of the mountain, and is where Adam, the first human being, was created.

It is also the site where the Biblical patriarch Abraham was commanded to prepare his son Isaac for sacrifice, (by the way, the Muslims believe it is Ishmael who was nearly sacrificed) and where the binding of Isaac – the Foundation Stone – took place. The Holy of Holies, around which both the First and Second Holy Temples were built, is set around the Foundation Stone.

Known to the Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount site is believed to be that from which Islam’s prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven to speak with God about the details of prayer rituals after a night-long journey to Jerusalem, “the farthest mosque,” on his steed Buraq. For this reason, Islamists fight with particular ferocity over the site and do what they can to claim sovereignty over the Temple Mount.

Israel’s willingness to allow the Islamic Waqf Authority to administer the site has backfired dozens of times as increasing violence by Islamist extremists on the eve of every Jewish holiday makes it clear it is impossible for the status quo to continue.

A similar scenario was deliberately used by Hamas to ignite the Second Intifada in the year 2000 when MK Ariel Sharon made a visit to the Temple Mount just prior to the Jewish new year holidays, setting off violent Muslim riots and sparking a lethal police response. It seems likely that plans are afoot to recreate the same scenario again.

Israeli and Palestinian Authority negotiators are warning each other over what will happen if each walks away from the negotiating table — and neither is talking about the subject for which they were brought to the table.

Israel has warned the PA that if the entity does not cease its violations of an agreement to refrain from joining international treaties and organizations, the Jewish State will respond with more unilateral actions of its own.

And the Palestinian Authority negotiators are responding that they just don’t care — they will simply sign more international treaties and conventions, including one giving the entity membership at the International Criminal Court in The Hague — and establish recognition for their entity as a new country, albeit one without recognized, negotiated borders, that way.

Both are adroitly avoiding the real reason they are sitting there: how to wrestle with the knotty problem of finding a solution to an unsolvable crisis — a looming deadline for talks on an issue that cannot be solved to anyone’s satisfaction by Western standards. The Palestinian Authority is actually TWO entities, not one: Gaza, run by Hamas, and Ramallah-controlled areas of Judea & Samaria. Worse, all of these populations have now been effectively brainwashed into thorough hatred of Jews and Israel — fed on a daily diet of media incitement sponsored by the PA government and the surrounding Arab nations, in total violation of the internationally-recognized Oslo Accords.

There is no way to dial that back, even if they wanted to — and perhaps some of the PA leaders do — but most of them would not even if they could. The question now is how to keep this fiasco from blowing up in everyone’s faces while keeping American mediators — who tend to complicate the picture and only make things worse — at bay.

But at least Israelis and PA negotiators are meeting — until this point, the Americans have been at the table for every single encounter since November, and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, whose presence was required, has not been.

The PA negotiators allegedly refused to come to the table without them; but one has only to read the autobiographies of the founders of Israel to see what was going on in negotiations during prior wars to wonder what the real story is behind this account as well. What is certain is that the media is only hearing part of the tale — and the public even less.

Regardless, the PA move is intended to create a de facto recognition of the entity as an independent sovereign nation by evading the Oslo Accords. The 1993 agreement signed by the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin require the PA to negotiate a final status agreement with Israel. It includes a requirement for the PA to abandon terror and negotiate final borders, among other issues.

The Israeli sanctions have already begun. Jerusalem has begun to deduct sums from taxes it collects each month – some $110 million — on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. The money will be used to pay down the massive debt the PA owes to Israel for the electricity it receives, use of Israeli hospitals and provision of specialized medical care. The PA owes Israel nearly half a billion shekels. The PA is screaming over the reduction of the funds because the taxes Israel collects and transfers to its coffers each month represent nearly two-thirds of its income.

Nevertheless, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official Nabil Shaath brushed aside the Israeli threat when speaking with reporters on Sunday after a meeting with a German delegation in the Samaria-based PA capital of Ramallah. The move, he said, “will not stop us from joining international treaties and conventions,” according to the PA news agency WAFA.

Three Jewish families moved into the “Peace House” in Hebron Sunday after receiving approval from Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, five years after his predecessor in the Olmert government brutally expelled dozens of Jews from the building.

The entry of Jews, with the official backing of the Supreme Court, represents a turning point for the rights of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria and against the Palestinian Authority-media-political-judicial torture chamber that has mangled  normalcy to the point it cannot be identified..

A Jew, reportedly a religious American of Syrian descent whose ancestors escaped the Arab pogrom in Hebron in 1929, purchased the building seven years ago from Arabs for approximately $1 million.

The Arab seller, a Jordanian, had sold it through a third party and did not realize that the building eventually would end up in the hands of Jews. The Palestinian Authority, banking on Jordanian law, makes a sale of property to Jews punishable by death, one of their principles of being a “peace partner.”

The Peace House is a four-story building that housed 25 Jewish families and yeshiva students until the government ordered them out in 2008, less than year after the purchase, because the legality of the purchase was questioned and their presence was deemed as endangering security

The building is called the “Peace House,” but Israel’s center-left media have insisted on calling it the “The House of Contention,” past of their propaganda machine to show that anything that settlers do is harmful for peaceful relations with Arabs.

If the Jews simply would leave Hebron, and all of Judea and Samaria, and live in Tel Aviv and the Negev, there would be no problems.

That is the formula that has been marketed for decade, despite the War of Attrition on the 1960s when Arabs from Jordan and Egypt constantly attacked Jews, despite the  Six-Day War when seven Arab nations circled Israel like vultures ready to pounce, and despite the Israeli government’s expulsion of Jews from Gaza in 2005 to make Israel safe for Hamas to attack with tens of thousands of missiles.

Welcome to the “peace process.”

That is why peace process lovers Amir Peretz and Ehud Barak, defense ministers  in the corrupt Olmert government, did everything they could to keep the Jews out of the building. Barak brought in the goon squads to violently expel Jews who had been living in the Peace House. The police swarmed in after he tricked the Jews to believe negotiations would be held before any police action would take place.

The building has been bought in 2007. After the initial purchase, the courts played along with the Arabs and Peace Now, accepting their appeals and questioning the legality of the transaction, until finally deciding that a lower court would have to decide on who really owns the building, but until then, no one could live there.

A lower court ruled last year that the Jews indeed legally purchased the building, but that decision was appealed to the Supreme Court, which last month rejected the petition.

Since the Defense Minister is the ultimate authority in Judea and Samaria, at least until it is annexed and placed under Israeli sovereignty, court approval of the sale does not mean the Jewish owners could move in. Unlike Peretz and Barak, who made lives miserable for Jews before resorting to force, Ya’alon signed on the dotted line Sunday after the owners paid the final $300,000 that was owed to the Arab seller

The three-justice panel that ended the ordeal exhibited rare common sense. Justice Daphne Barak Erez, who is considered a liberal and  a court activist, wrote that both sides in the dispute have emotional and ideological issues, but they are not in the purview of the courts.

Card-carrying Israeli citizens in a totally Arab city in the western Galilee already are preparing celebrations for what they expect will be the return of their “heroes” who killed Israelis in terrorist attacks.

The United States is trying to work out a deal with Israel to allow freeing several Arab terrorists with Israeli citizenship in order to continue the so-called peace talks that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry resurrected last July. Key government Cabinet ministers have said they will quit their posts rather than vote to free the terrorists.

In the city of  Baqa al-Gharbiyye, located northwest of Netanya and almost adjacent to the western edge of Samaria, citizens already have posted a banner with a picture of four Arab-Israeli terrorists and a message, “Today you; tomorrow all the prisoners. You are returning heroes.”

That’s right, ”Heroes,”

Kerry not only expects Israel to free the murderers, but he also expects that the country swallow with pride such a humanitarian effort in which the Arabs learn, once again, that a murderer is a “hero” when he kills Jews.

The picture was posted on Facebook by Oren Tamam, brother of Moses  Tamam, who was murdered by Arab terrorists carrying Israeli citizenship.

The security fence, which has stopped almost all suicide bombers from crossing into major Israeli cities to blow up as many Jews as possible, separates Baqa al-Gharbiyye from its sister city in Samaria.

When Israeli negotiator Tzipi Livni was Foreign Minister in 2008, she raised the possibility of transferring Israeli Arab communities, including Baqa al-Garbiyye to the Palestinian Authority, which rejected the idea.

It is more than likely that the Arabs, too, would not want to be Palestinian Authority citizens because they would lose their welfare benefits as Israelis.

Moreover, it is lot easier to murder Jews when you have Israeli citizenship and live in the country, without having to cross a checkpoint and endure one of these “demeaning” inspections that are carried out at thousands of border crossings in the world.

U.S. mediators are in Jerusalem “helping” Israeli and Palestinian Authority negotiators get back to the table and back to work. Again.

Chief negotiators Tzipi Livni for Israel and Saeb Erekat for the PA are scheduled to meet today with U.S. envoy Martin Indyk and others. Indyk, Livni and Erekat have already met three times this week. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman is in the United States, and met last night in Washington D.C. with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

“We note that the contact in meetings between the negotiators is continuing and note that they are engaging in serious and intensive efforts to find a way out of the current impasse,” said U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki at a briefing Wednesday night. She was careful not to confirm that a meeting between the two sides would actually take place Thursday in Jerusalem. One cannot ever predict what will happen in Jerusalem and the Obama administration is now sadder and wiser.

Kerry kept his words upbeat while speaking to media ahead of his meeting with Liberman. “We are working hard to find a way forward. And both parties indicate they would like to find a way to go forward in the talks.”

Since the talks have yet to make any real progress at all, let alone move the “peace process” even one concrete inch on core issues, one questions exactly where “forward” each party means to go when they make that statement to the United States. It seems that Israel has made all the concessions – like freeing dozens of bloodthirsty terrorists in repeated “good will gestures” – and no visible reciprocal moves have been made by the Palestinian Authority.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu finally ordered all government ministries except those related to defense, and all negotiators except Tzipi Livni, to cease civilian and economic contacts with the PA. The move came Wednesday in response to the PA’s brazen violation of its commitment not to sign membership for international agencies, treaties and organizations until the end of talks with Israel, slated for April 29.

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas signed on to 15 global treaties, as head of the ‘State of Palestine,’ four days after Israel failed to release a group of 30 terrorist prisoners, among them 20 Israeli Arab citizens over which Abbas actually has no jurisdiction whatsoever.

That group was the last of four whose releases were supposed to be linked to progress in the talks and the active participation of Abbas at the negotiating table. But Abbas had not been present since last November, and no progress had been made.

Israeli ministers balked at releasing the final group of prisoners in the face of no progress, a month ahead of a deadline for talks that had accomplished nothing. Instead, Israel advanced a proposal to extend the talks until the end of 2014 and release 400 more prisoners in addition to the group of 30 scheduled to be freed – but the PA rebuffed the offer and instead walked away.

When talking to media in Washington, Liberman was blunt but polite about his view of what crashed the negotiations, choosing his words carefully.

“Unilateral steps,” he said, would only “undermine all our efforts.” A final status deal that would bring peace means a lot to Israel. The Jewish State is “ready to sacrifice a lot for this goal.”

Jewish Home party chairman Naftali Bennett announced Wednesday night that he is urging Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in writing to annex large Jewish population centers in Judea and Samaria and take them out of the status of “military rule.”

He explained his timing is directly related to the  Palestinian Authority’s “new record of extortion” throughout nearly nine months of “negotiations” that have been nothing more than drawn out period of demands in return for Israel’s sitting down to hear more demands.

“The Palestinians broke the principles of negotiations and applied for membership” in U.N. agencies, Bennett wrote, adding that the Palestinian Authority continues to incite for the murder of Jews.

“We  have been beating our heads against the wall repeatedly during negotiations – and not surprisingly the wall is not broken,” Bennett continued.

His proposal would place Gush Etzion, which includes Efrat, Neve Daniel, Elazar, Beitar Illit and several kibbutzim under Israeli sovereignty, as Israel did in 1980 when it annexed areas of Jerusalem that were restored to the country in the Six-Day War in 19767. Similar, Israel annexed the Golan Heights.

Almost all foreign media and foreign governments refer to the areas as “occupied.”

The city of Ariel, in central Samaria, Beit El in northern Samaria, and Ma’aleh Adumim, east of Jerusalem, also would be annexed under Bennett’s plan.

“It is clear that the current process has run its course and we are entering a new era,” Bennett stated.

Momentum for placing the large population enters of Jews under Israeli sovereignty has been building up for at least two years.

Last year, a government-appointed commission of three legal experts, including retired Supreme Court Justice Edmund Levy, concluded that Israel is not an “occupier” and that Jews have the right to live anywhere in Judea and Samaria under international law.

Prime Minister Netanyahu shelved the report, but the recent collapse of the illusion of trust between the  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Mahmoud Abbas and the Israeli government has opened the way for both the Palestinian Authority and Israeli to stake out claims.

Abbas already  has said he will ask for membership in U.N. agencies , with an eye on the International Court, where he wants to file “war crimes” claims against Israel.