Over $1 billion pledged for Palestinian projects in Bethlehem conference

Delegates at a conference in Bethlehem this week pledged to invest a total of $1.4 billion in Palestinian business projects, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told a news conference on Friday.

Fayyad said he expected investment in the projects to create up to 35,000 jobs in the West Bank.

Fayyad and President Mahmoud Abbas hosted the conference in an attempt to raise as much as $2 billion in funding for business and various projects in the West Bank and Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, hoping to boost the Palestinian economy as they hold peace talks with Israel.

The $1.4 billion included about $550 million from major Arab investors for a new West Bank town and a shopping complex. Hundreds of potential investors from the private sector attended the conference in Bethlehem, just south of Jerusalem.

International donors met in Paris in December to pledge $7.7 billion in state as a way of bolstering Abbas and his negotiations with Israel on establishing a Palestinian state.

Officials from the World Bank, including Fayyad himself stressed that while investment in the Palestinian territories is crucial, the economy would not flourish unless Israel eased restrictions on West Bank mobility.

Fayyad, a former World Bank economist who was appointed last year after Abbas dismissed Hamas Islamists from government in a move that ended trade sanctions, said pledges made at the conference were just "the starting point."

"We are throwing a party and the whole world is invited," Fayyad said at the end of the three- day conference.