Kerry arrives in Israel on new bid to tackle thorny regional question

US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Israel on Tuesday starting a new mission aimed at working out a settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians amid signs that disputes between the two sides have remained very much deep and hard to reconcile. Shortly after he stepped down from plane at the Tel Aviv airport, Kerry proceeded to the location where the former premier, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated on November 4, 1995, by a lone Jewish militant, a staunch opponent to diplomacy with the Arabs. Kerry is scheduled to hold separate talks, on Wednesday, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and later with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the latter's headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah. According to the Israeli media, Kerry, who has given the Israelis and Palestinians nine months to hammer out a deal, to be presented at a broad conference in January, had faced huge hurdles on the path for paving the way for a viable settlement. The Palestinians have insisted that holding a new round of negotiations with the Israelis must be based on the theme that Israel pull out to the 1967 border line, meaning withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and eastern Jerusalem, however, the Israelis have continued building settlements in some of these regions. According to media reports, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, at a meeting held tonight in Jerusalem, were deeply at odds over these topics