US-brokered talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority begin tomorrow Washington. Both sides agreed to sit down last month after the US successfully pressured Palestinian leaders to drop their precondition of an Israeli settlement freeze. As leaders headed to Washington, Palestinian militants killed four Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. The Palestinian group Hamas says it carried out the attack. Nabil Shaath of the Palestinian Authority condemned the shootings but said Israel bore responsibility for maintaining hundreds of thousands of settlers on occupied Palestinian land.

Nabil Shaath: "In the area of Hebron, the Israelis have complete security control, and we are not involved, even in matters relating to Palestinian civil police matters. The Israelis interfere in their occupation and control, and thus it would be very difficult for them to hold us responsible in a case like this. In any case, I believe that the settlements are always part of the security problem and not that they build settlements to solve the security issue. And it [settlements] always creates a set of additional security problems that we hope does not exist, and we hope there won’t be any civilian casualties from either side."

In response to the attack, Palestinian Authority security forces carried out what’s being called the largest mass arrests in the history of the West Bank, detaining an estimated 300 people accused of links to Hamas.